by Ken Ward
“Two Hornets out of Pensacola,” Norris said. She turned to her assistant who was holding a cell phone to her ear. The assistant spoke into the phone and received word back which she relayed quietly to Norris. Norris's face fell. “Mr. President. The fighters are within range. They have the target locked over the Florida-Georgia border.”
Howell sprang from his chair and pounded his fist on the table. “God dammit! Abort!”
Norris snapped around to face her assistant. “Abort!” She shouted to the woman holding the phone. “Abort now!”
CHAPTER 25
The skies over northern Florida were clear. Captain James Turner glanced at the controls of his F/A-18 Hornet. Off his right wing he could see Captain Valerie King's Hornet cruising at his altitude. “You see it?” King said.
“Yep,” James replied. “Got it.”
Fifteen seconds after looking at his panel, Turner could see a white blip against the blue sky. “Control, this is Papa, I have a visual,” he said into his mask.
“10-4, Papa, stand by,” came the response from base.
Turner and King continued forward, straight toward the passenger jet. A few seconds later the plane was directly in front of them. “Control, Papa and Stinger, in position,” Turner said. “Permission to engage.”
Turner and King hovered high above the land where Georgia and Florida met. This was the first time in their careers the two fighter pilots had been charged with taking down a commercial airliner. Turner had expressed his misgivings before climbing into his cockpit, but he was duty sworn. He and King both did their best to push what their mission actually entailed to the back of their minds and to treat it more objectively. “If you have to think of that plane as an enemy combatant, then you do it,” were the words of their boss. They rattled around Turner's head as he moved his thumb toward the red button on his stick. He was close enough to the big jet, he could just make out the large block letters painted in scarlet on the side of the craft. RepublicAir.
“Papa, this is Control. Good for engagement.”
Turner swallowed hard. He flicked the protective lid off the red trigger. He checked his missile gauge and saw that he had 'LOCK'. “10-4 Control, Papa firing now.” He pressed the button and a missile released from beneath his left wing and bolted forward under heavy thrust.
“This is Control. Abort! Repeat! Abort!”
“What!”
Turner and King sat for a beat in stunned silence watching the fiery tail of the missile streak across the blue sky. The projectile slammed into the left side wing of the commercial jet causing a huge orange fireball to explode outward.
“Target is hit,” Turner said. “Control, that abort call came late.”
“Papa and Stinger,” the voice on the radio said, “return to base immediately.”
The two pilots swung their fighter jets high in an arc and retreated back toward their base in Pensacola, leaving the flaming passenger plane in their wake.
“Abort!” General Norris's underling shouted into the cell phone.
There was a collective holding of breath in the White House Situation Room. President Howell broke the silence. “And?” He said, looking at General Norris.
Rick pointed to the display screen at the side of the room. There was a computer generated graphic of the commercial plane and the two fighter jets. A red dotted line traced from one of the fighters into the wing of the passenger jet. “You're kidding,” Howell gasped. “Tell me what happened.”
“The call came too late,” Norris said. “Mr. President, the plane's been hit.”
Howard returned to the bottom of the plane, escorting some guy that he had also zip tied. The man dug his feet into the floor as soon as he saw me sitting in the room. “Don't bring me in here with him,” the man said. “No way.”
Howard wrestled the man down to the floor. “Just sit there,” Howard commanded. The man gave up fighting him. “Look, if you were gonna get this thing you'd already have it,” Howard said. “Same for all of us. So relax.”
“What'd you do?” I said to the guy.
“None of your business.”
“Kid,” Howard said shaking his head, “just leave him be. You've got your phone, just do your own thing.”
“Hey,” the guy said. “How come he gets to use his phone? I wanna use mine.”
“You can sit there and keep quiet,” Howard said. “Try that first. Then we'll see.”
“You can't treat me like this, yo!”
Howard looked at the guy sternly. “You should've thought of that before you hit that woman.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Shut up!”
“Both of you,” Howard said, “knock it off. This flight has been long enough.”
Suddenly, my ears were ringing loudly. Howard flew up into the ceiling. Me and the other guy hovered in the air, completely enveloped in gray smoke. My mind barely had time to process what was happening when we slammed back hard onto the floor. Howard laid lifeless, likely unconscious. Dozens of screams echoed from above. Water sprinklers had engaged and were pouring throughout the belly of the plane. A loud alarm kept repeating. I laid flat trying not to inhale too much smoke. The sound of the plane's engines had changed into more of a sickening moan.
“What's happening?” The guy hollered. “I can't move my leg!”
“Just stay still,” I said. “Obviously, we've hit something.”
The floor of the room had a definite tilt downward. I could tell we were losing altitude, but I had no idea how high or how low we were in the first place, or how much longer we'd had until we reached Miami. I laid there, staring at the ceiling, bracing for the moment the plane would break apart and I'd be launched out into the open atmosphere, free-falling toward the ground. Any second now, I thought.
CHAPTER 26
Captain Ben Berard tried to maintain his composure in the face of a panel full of bright lights flashing in front of him. He looked to his co-pilot, Denise Hogue who returned his gaze with fear in her eyes. With his port side engines gone and much of the wing with them, he repeatedly rowed the yoke in front of him in order to ease the loss of altitude to try and avoid having the craft fall into a death spiral. Coated in sweat, Berard watched the altimeter and switched off three different alarms. Hogue adjusted her headset and pushed the mic closer to her lips. “Mayday,” she said. “Mayday, this is RepublicAir Flight 381 requesting emergency assistance, over.”
The two pilots heard nothing but static through their headphones.
“Mayday, mayday. This is RepublicAir Flight 381. We've been struck by some kind of projectile. We need assistance to make an emergency landing. Please respond. Over.”
Again, there was no reply.
“Why isn't anyone answering?” Hogue shouted over the noise.
“No idea.”
“Was that a missile that hit us?”
Berard didn't answer. He fought against the shaking yoke and the plane rattled intensely as it lost altitude fast. Hogue checked the GPS. “North central Florida,” she said. “Looks like a lot of open land.”
“Good.”
Two flight attendants appeared in the entry way to the baggage compartment. I looked up as they entered, both holding the wall to try and keep their balance. They looked beside me with alarm as Howard laid unconscious. “He got knocked out,” the other guy said, laying on his back and propping himself up on his elbow.
I attempted to speak, but could only cough. Breathing had become even more difficult suddenly. One of the attendants let go of the wall and rushed over to me. The other attendant went to the other guy. “We have to get you back up in your seat,” the attendant said to me. “You need to put on an oxygen mask.”
“Sounds good to me,” the other guy said. “But what about him?” He pointed to Howard.
“We'll have to come back for him,” one of the attendants said. “Let's go.”
Back up on my feet, I flexed the aching muscles in my legs to maintain my balance. It became easier
to stay upright, once in the narrow corridor that led to the stairs going up. The attendant let go of my elbow once at the row where my seat was located. Surprisingly all of the passengers had moved back from the front of the plane back into their seats. Everyone had their yellow oxygen masks on and looked about as panicked as you'd expect when the plane you're on seems to have dipped into a minor form of nosedive and the engines sound just as under the weather as me. Maura glanced up at me, and instead of reading disdain in her eyes, I saw genuine fear. For a moment that emotion humanized her in my eyes. How I could think of something so trivial in a terrifying instance as that was is beyond me, but the human brain is a strange thing. Jeremy kept his gaze on the floor. His hands were balled into fists. I could see the white of his knuckles. Plunked into my seat, the flight attendant pulled the mask down from the compartment above my seat and she put the mask over my mouth and nose. I watched as the other guy who'd been down in the baggage compartment with me was ushered back into his seat as well. A minute or so later, I saw a few flight crew members move Howard down the aisle and back into his seat.
While a lot of the passengers around me had decided to fix their gaze downward, as though trying to convince themselves they weren't on a plane at all, I looked around in awe. Many of the passengers had pulled the shutters down over their windows, especially the passengers seated on my side of the plane. I thought that was curious until I looked out through the window in the row in front of me. From that angle I could see half the wing on my side was gone. The end of half of the wing looked frayed with wires and metal cables jutting out beneath orange flames flapping against the wind. I remember the image of it hit me like an electrical shock. I couldn't believe our own government would do that to a commercial airliner.
The lights in the cabin kept flickering and the front of the plane dipped even lower. I had to push the bottoms of my feet into the carpet to keep my shins from hitting the bottom of the seat in front of me. The oxygen flowed through the mask and felt cool against my skin. For the first time in that entire flight I felt as though I could breathe clearly. I grabbed the armrests on either side of me as the plane began to shake violently and out through the window the ground came into view. Whether it was warranted or not, I thought of Kathy for a fleeting moment. I was still feeling hurt by her, but I did love her, and I worried I wouldn't live to ever see her again. Glancing left again, daring myself to look, I saw the land come into better focus. Green foliage, many rows of trees. Short trees. We were swinging lower toward them. I didn't like how quickly the ground seemed to be moving up to greet us. I pushed my back hard into my seat.
“This is the Captain!” Came an urgent voice from the speakers above. “Brace for impact!”
Many of the passengers instinctively bent forward placing their heads between their knees as best they could. I don't know why, but in that moment I was reluctant to do it. Instead I wanted to keep watching out the window, as though by keeping an eye on what was happening I could somehow prevent calamity. A massive roar came up on the plane's right side as the ground appeared no more than a couple hundred feet down from us. Screams erupted as the front of the plane jolted from a downward angle to an upward one. The change violently whipped people from their bent over positions and threw them back in their seats. I don't know how to describe it, but where as once I saw the ground beneath us rushing upward, without warning my limbs were thrust out in front of me and I felt the strain of the seatbelt holding me in place as the cabin went dark and the baggage compartments flipped open and dumped their contents and a barrage of small items flew everywhere. With a vicious slam we'd hit the ground. I couldn't believe I'd stayed conscious. The plane carried its forward momentum for what seemed like an hour, but was probably just twenty seconds or so. The engines died and the plane finally came to rest with a powerful shudder.
The cabin was a mess. Luggage laid all over the aisle and on top of terrified passengers. Both Maura and Jeremy appeared to be fine, as did everyone else I could lay eyes on. Miraculous. Ahead and behind me bolts of daylight burst through into the cabin. “This way!” Shouted one of the flight crew. People threw off their masks and burst from their seats, practically trampling one another to get to the emergency exits. After stumbling and tripping my way over mounds of carry-on bags and busted packets of snack food, I squinted as I stepped out of the emergency exit and into the hot Florida sun. All around us were orange trees. The flight crew, looking as disheveled as you might expect, herded the stunned passengers into clusters and motioned for everyone to continue moving away from the surprisingly intact airplane. Once a sufficient distance away, everyone sat on the grass. No one really knew what came next. We all just sat in silence, as though we'd just been through a war.
CHAPTER 27
The downed plane had left quite a wide trench in the middle of the orange grove. Broken trees were piled up on either side of the half-buried craft. Branches, leaves, squished oranges and mounts of dirt littered the ground all the way to where we were seated. A few whimpers could be heard over the breeze, but for the most part we all sat there dumbfounded, rubbing various scrapes and bruises. Then a piercing sound cut through the silence. It began with a faint wail then a cacophony of sirens filled our ears. There wasn't a road anywhere in sight, but that didn't seem to deter the army of emergency vehicles that descended on us. Well, I should say, they didn't descend too far. The first of the ambulances and fire trucks and police vehicles to arrive formed a line almost a football field in length away from us. Some of the passengers stood up and waved their arms overhead as though the emergency workers didn't know where we were. The first of the responders climbed out of their vehicles and I could make out that they were wearing full-body suits, hazmat suits by the look of it. A person in one of these suits stepped out of a police SUV and stood behind their driver door. A large group of passengers began running toward the assembled vehicles. I stood up and walked closer to the cluster and I could see the police officer next to their SUV holding a mic attached to a cord. A loud speaker on top of their vehicle relayed their message loudly across the grove.
“Stay where you are,” said the police officer. “Do not come any closer.”
The passengers who had been jogging stopped, but I could see in their body language they were confused. They held their hands out by their sides and looked around at the other passengers in frustration.
“Will the passenger named Matthew Gravenhurst please come forward.”
Upon hearing my name I got really scared. My stomach dropped. Were they going to shoot me or something? It was a fair question given they'd just shot down a plane full of people. That we all survived was a miracle and thanks to one hell of a pilot and flight crew, but I remember thinking maybe the government wanted to finish the job.
“Him?” Somebody yelled from among the passengers who stood about 50 yards from the emergency workers. “Why him?”
Someone else hollered, “why is he getting treated first?”
“This isn't fair!”
“Hey,” I yelled to the others, “there is no treatment for this. Remember?”
“Yeah, but why do you get to be seen first?”
“I don't think this is a good thing. They think I'm Patient Zero.”
“Well that's because you are, asshole.”
“They're probably going to put a bullet in my head,” I hollered. “You wanna take my place?”
“Calm down,” some other guy said to me.
“Tell that to your friends.”
“Matthew Gravenhurst,” came the call again over the loud speaker. “Please step away from the crowd.”
The other passengers and crew stared at me. I walked toward the police SUV, I held my hands over my head. I imagined the emergency workers thought of me as public enemy number one and had designs on taking me out. I wasn't going to give them any more incentive with any sudden movements or hands in my pockets. I'd seen enough wrongful police shooting videos to know better. Once I'd walked about twenty yards apar
t from the rest of the passengers and crew, the police officer with the mic yelled for me to stop. “We're sending a suit to you,” said the officer over the speaker. “Put it on.”
I stood there staring at the SUV for a good thirty seconds wondering how they were going to send me a suit. The statement made no sense to me until I saw a small robot roll out from behind the police vehicle. The thing held a square plastic package in its clawed arms and rolled clumsily over the dirt and grass toward me. The thing rolled right up to my feet and I could see through the transparent package it was holding there was a hazmat suit inside.
“Put the suit on now,” commanded the officer. “Over your clothes.”
I ripped open the package and the suit unfurled in front of me. It was mostly gray and white with fluorescent yellow patches. I stepped into the suit and closed it up. Immediately upon doing so the heat inside the suit built up fast. I could hear every breath I took loudly in my ears and the wide plastic viewing mask steamed up a little. I did my best to slow my breathing, telling myself to relax.
“Now walk forward,” the police officer said. “Keep your hands up.”
I walked across the grove to the emergency vehicles. There were dozens of them. A small army of workers in hazmat suits watched me as I came closer. As I came close to the police SUV, the officer put her mic back on its hook and slammed her driver door closed. She took me by the arm and pointed toward the cluster of vehicles, all still sitting there with their overhead lights flashing. She walked me through the crowd of vehicles and impressively at the rear of this small army they'd already put up a small white tent with plastic windows. The officer stopped short of the tent and let go of my arm. She pointed at a man who walked over to me. I could just make out her muffled words. “Go with him,” she said.
The man looked at me sternly. He had glasses and a white mustache. “This way,” he yelled. He turned toward the tent and I followed him. Another worker pulled the flap entrance to the tent open for the mustached man. He stepped into the tent and looked back at me, waiting for me to do the same.