Phoenix Rising

by Nance, John J. ;

  The chairman wasn’t finished.

  “Ron, what’s going on with the FAA? Are they after our ass, or what?”

  Taylor, an imposing lump of a man at over 280 pounds, had made a fortune creating an international chain of warehouse clubs. His considerable bank account and a lifelong devotion to the original Pan American Airways had made him the engine—and the chairman—of the corporation they had formed to re-fly the Pan Am name. But Taylor needed help finding airports, and knew nothing of what went on there. For the most part, Joe Taylor had stayed out of Ron Lamb’s way. But now that the corporate ship was under fire, Taylor had rumbled in at dawn and insisted on occupying the bridge—along with the invited members of the impromptu war council consisting of the four senior vice-presidents now arrayed in front of Lamb’s desk.

  Taylor’s little round eyes were boring holes in Ron Lamb’s, searching for a barometer with which to measure the danger they were in. Taylor could be abrupt and undiplomatic at times, but he was a smart businessman with an iron grasp of basic corporate finance.

  Ron Lamb inclined his head toward the vice-president of operations, Chad Jennings, who snapped to attention.

  “Mr. Taylor, we don’t think there’s any sort of, uh, campaign on to nail us on violations, but as you may know, a team of FAA inspectors descended on our Denver maintenance station last week and found parts records missing. Yesterday they called and claimed we were using the wrong minimum-equipment lists on the 747s, and to brace for a large fine. They said they were responding to tips.”

  Taylor fired a barrage of questions at Jennings before refocusing on the CEO.

  “Sounds like one of our competitors may be setting us up, Ron.”

  Ron Lamb’s secretary appeared in the office doorway with a handful of newspaper articles and wire stories faxed in from New York, all of them painting gloomy pictures of Pan Am’s future.

  Ron had come around the desk to read with the others. He returned to his chair now, after slamming several of the pages onto the coffee table.

  “Goddammit, we’re profitable! We’re not sinking! Where are these stories coming from?”

  Ralph Basanji, senior vice-president of public affairs, leaned forward. “Ron, they’re coming as a result of Bill Hayes’s dismissal. They see us kick out our finance man suddenly, and several weeks go by without a new one, so these guys in Manhattan turn into fiction writers in order to explain it.”

  “It’s that important? Having a current CFO, I mean?” Taylor asked Basanji, who nodded solemnly.

  Ron Lamb felt his stomach tighten even more. What if Elizabeth turned him down? He hadn’t even considered anyone else. He’d probably have to promote someone from within—fast. But the analysts would see through that in a second.

  “Mr. Lamb?” His secretary’s voice wafted over the desk from the built-in telephone intercom.

  “Yes?”

  “Miss Sterling on line two, sir. She’s calling from Provincetown, Massachusetts.”

  Ron Lamb took an overtly ragged breath and picked up the receiver.

  “Okay, Ron, I’ll take it. You’ve got yourself a new CFO.”

  “How soon can you get here, Elizabeth? We need you yesterday.”

  He had already made the split-second decision not to deploy her to New York to work against the rumor mill. If she was in Cape Cod, she probably knew nothing of the rumors, and so much the better. There were things he needed to explain to her in person.

  “Good Lord, Ron, I haven’t resigned from Silverman, Knox yet.”

  “Well,” Ron Lamb replied, “at least let us announce you’re coming aboard. How much time do you need?”

  “Two weeks.” Her reply was instantaneous.

  “Can you come out here tomorrow, just for a quick orientation?”

  “Yes, I can do that.”

  “Good! I’ll have first-class tickets for you on our early-afternoon flight out of Kennedy tomorrow. Bring Kelly if you like. Just give me one day to get you briefed and up to speed on some important items.”

  “Such as why the financial press thinks you’re going belly-up?” She said the words in a breezy tone, but there was stunned silence from Seattle.

  “Oh, I know that’s nonsense, Ron. I read all the information you gave me. You were worried I’d back out, right?”

  “Yeah … yeah, I was. We need you out here, y’know.”

  “Well, I’m a bit tougher than that.”

  At the very moment Ron Lamb’s office was emptying of Chairman Taylor and other Pan Am corporate officers in downtown Seattle, Pan Am’s chief pilot, Brian Murphy, was engaged in a delicate balancing act: aligning his Boeing 767 for a tough approach to fog-shrouded Anchorage, Alaska, while trying to figure out why his cellular phone was ringing.

  A background irritation at first, the rapid chirping was causing the check captain in the right seat to flash worried looks at various corners of the cockpit in urgent search of the strangely non-Boeing-like noise. Nothing seemed wrong, yet there it was again, echoing this time like a frantic electronic canary in full warble, the tiny sound waves bouncing in confused abundance from every surface in the small technological capsule of instruments and lights.

  With the final approach course comfortably tamed, the landing gear extended, and the invisible airport seven miles ahead of them (according to the moving map display), Captain Brian Murphy snapped on the auto-flight system and reached for his phone.

  The voice in his ear was honeyed and familiar, but unrecognized in the distractions of the moment.

  “Brian? Is that you?” The higher-than-masculine register conjured up instant images of things soft and feminine. Some deep recess of his brain assigned to deal with recognition finally located the right biochemical file, the find instantly triggering responses that rippled through his motor control centers like the initial shudder of a major earthquake. He lurched forward in his seat involuntarily.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Yes, it’s me. Where are you?”

  “In the box … wait a minute.”

  Brian nodded at the check captain, who was pointing to a switch, which he now threw, freezing the ten-million-dollar flight simulator in theoretical flight four miles from the theoretical runway.

  Brian pressed the small phone to his cheek and hunched over the control yoke, a broad smile bisecting his face and the check ride all but forgotten.

  “Where are you? Are you here in Seattle?”

  “No … Cape Cod … but I’m coming to Seattle.”

  “Wonderful! When? For how long?”

  “Maybe forever, Brian.”

  “What do you mean, Elizabeth? You aren’t teasing me, are you?” Brian’s deep voice overrode the background hum of the electronic cooling fans, which normally filled the cockpit like audible cotton. The check captain in the right seat recognized instantly something intensely personal in his tone. Without a word, the man unstrapped and headed for the exit at the rear of the simulator’s cockpit, leaving his boss in the privacy of a multimillion-dollar phone booth.

  She told him then of the job offer, and her acceptance, and of the impending move. She had refrained from calling him on the return from Tokyo, not wanting to complicate her decision, and had tried to imagine life in Seattle without Brian’s image imposing itself on every thought.

  That attempt had failed. Despite all the years and the supposedly final choices they had made, she missed him. She missed him more than she had ever let herself admit.

  “I’m coming in tomorrow for a quick orientation,” she said.

  “Tomorrow? Damn!”

  “You’re flying?”

  “I’ve got no choice. I have to be in D.C. We’ve, ah, had a few problems with the FAA I’ve got to take care of.”

  The word problems didn’t register. The fact that she wouldn’t see him for a few more weeks did.

  Suddenly, it seemed an eternity.

  3

  Tuesday, March 7, 10:00 P.M.

  Pan Am Maintenance Base, Moses La
ke, Washington

  Jake Wallace turned the time card over again in complete confusion. The imprint that showed that he had already clocked in for the graveyard shift was still there in stark black and cream, the time of 9:54 P.M. showing clearly on the appropriate line.

  Pan Am’s luxurious new round-the-world service starts March twenty-

  What the hell?

  Jake glanced around the interior hallway of the sparkling new hangar, searching for an explanation. There were twenty-two other mechanics on the graveyard, and he was their foreman. Obviously one of them had grabbed Jake’s card by mistake.

  He sighed and began looking through the time cards of his shift-mates, verifying the time stamp on each one until he had counted twenty-two properly clocked-in employees.

  So much for the obvious explanation, he thought. He pocketed the time card and headed for Job Control.

  Ed Washburn looked up from his computer screen with a characteristic grin as Jake walked in, but received no smile in return from the bearded mechanic. In fact, Ed thought, he had never seen Jake Wallace look so preoccupied. All the employees of Pan Am’s Moses Lake facility were proud of their new hangar and their new airline and the beautiful fleet of refurbished 747s and 767s they were there to maintain. Most were veterans of bankrupt old-line airlines such as Braniff, Frontier, Eastern, and Pan Am, and all of them were grateful and excited to have been selected by the new Pan Am’s recruiters, made instant stockholders, and given a chance to make airline history—even if they did end up moving to the remoteness of central Washington State.

  Worried expressions, in other words, were rare in the Pan Am maintenance facility, and Jake’s was a classic mask of distracted concern.

  As two of his crew came in the door, Jake waved the offending time card in front of Ed and explained the problem.

  Ray McCarthy, who had overheard, raised his index finger in response.

  “That new man may have got hold of your card, Jake. He came in with me and clocked in just behind me. He seemed surprised his card was already there.”

  Jake Wallace looked at Ed Washburn, who looked back with the same expression Jake had worn seconds before. Simultaneously they turned toward McCarthy and spoke in stereo.

  “What new man?”

  He had worn the regulation white coveralls with the Pan Am logo, McCarthy explained, and introduced himself as Bill somebody-or-other before asking for directions to the Job Control office, which was just off the hangar floor. The last name sounded vaguely Norwegian. The man had come through the security door into the maintenance complex with McCarthy, and yes, it was Ray who had punched in the security code and opened the door for them both. Five-foot-ten and of medium build, the new man had a “forgettable face.”

  “No one checked through here, and I wasn’t expecting anyone new,” Ed Washburn told McCarthy. “Did he have an ID badge, Ray?”

  Ray McCarthy felt his stomach tighten as he tried to call up a memory of the man’s identification card. There had been something there clipped to his pocket, but in the darkness of the parking lot, he could have just assumed it was a Pan Am ID.

  “I thought it was there.”

  They all stared quietly at each other, silently turning over the implications in their heads.

  Washburn broke the silence.

  “Whoever he is, we’d better find this guy before he hurts himself, or steals the coffee money. I wonder if someone in Seattle hired him and forgot to tell us.”

  The search began casually. After all, there was sure to be a logical explanation. But when a quick walk-through of the facility turned up neither an explanation nor a confused new-hire mechanic, Ed Washburn, as shift supervisor, began to get seriously concerned. With FAA regulations regarding security of commercial aircraft and the incessant cautions about potential terrorist acts now parading around his memory in accusatory profusion, Washburn stepped up the search and alerted his boss at home. Robert Chenowith, the general manager of the maintenance base, jumped in his car and arrived in Job Control within fifteen minutes, equally worried. By 11:00 P.M., Washburn and Chenowith were sure that whoever the man had been, he was not a new hire. That meant his presence had to be considered threatening, until they knew otherwise.

  Two dozen mechanics now roamed the hangar and connecting buildings, looking for the intruder. Someone had invaded their space, and the group was determined to catch him. All other work had ceased.

  At first the search had centered around the only aircraft in the facility, Ship 612, a sparkling 747-200 which squatted with impatient majesty in the middle of the giant hangar, bathed in sodium vapor lights and looking magnificent. Ship 612 was due to be flown back to Seattle the following morning, carrying the latest modifications to the Compartment Class and First Class sections, and would fly a trip the next evening. They had to get it out of the Moses Lake hangar on time.

  Washburn had stationed Ray McCarthy in the door of Job Control. McCarthy looked thunderstruck, wide-eyed, and scared, his face a bloodless white. He had let the intruder in. All of this was occurring because he had failed to check the man’s ID badge.

  “When you last saw him, Ray, where was he heading?” Washburn asked on one circuit past the office.

  By 11:30 P.M. it was obvious that whoever had crashed their gate was long gone. Every square inch of floor space, every closet, every aircraft compartment, and every broad space in the rafters had been checked and checked again in a well-coordinated effort.

  But the intruder wasn’t there.

  They turned, then, to the more sinister question: Regardless of who he was, did the intruder do anything to our airplane?

  Two dozen people now began crawling over Ship 612. There was a procedure in the manuals to be used to examine an aircraft grounded by a bomb threat. They opened to that section now, using hand-held checklists to comb the 747 meticulously from radome to rudder, looking for anything unusual. But by 2:00 A.M., with every type of tampering, sabotage, theft, or other mischief considered and probed, a shaky Ed Washburn declared Ship 612 to be clean. With Chenowith’s permission, they terminated the search.

  Chenowith now faced a dilemma of his own, his hand hovering over the telephone in Job Control as his mind calculated the percentages in alerting his vice-president of maintenance in Seattle. He would be getting the man out of bed, of course, but for what? What else could be done?

  They did know that someone had been inside the perimeter, masquerading as a mechanic, and they did know the man had left. But whatever he had been doing in the meantime, it obviously couldn’t have involved sabotage. There was virtually nothing he could have done to 612 that wouldn’t already have been discovered.

  Seattle had enough to do without worrying about some benign intrusion in Moses Lake. Perhaps it was nothing more than an episode of industrial espionage, he reasoned. Maybe the guy had been after pictures of the interior, especially the new tapestries and other changes they had just made. After all, he rationalized, the big carriers were more than a little unhappy about Pan Am’s innovative cabins, and any of the big three could well afford to hire investigators—though it would be easier to buy a ticket.

  Despite the nagging doubts, Ship 612 was clean. Now his people would have to drive themselves twice as hard during the remaining four hours of their shift to get the huge bird rolled out by 6:00 A.M. and ready to fly back to Seattle.

  Industrial espionage. That was probably it.

  Chenowith read 2:45 A.M. on the wall clock as he quietly replaced the receiver, his decision not to call already made.

  At the same moment, some two hundred miles to the west, Pan Am’s president and CEO was sitting in the backseat of a rented limousine and rubbing his eyes, the heavy veil of sleepiness still wrapped around his head like a warm towel. Ron Lamb had presided over more expensive advertising campaigns in his years of airline leadership, but never one more critical than this. The multimillion-dollar advertising package he was supposed to help launch in little more than an hour was critical to Pan A
m’s success.

  The gold lettering on the slick black folder trumpeted the slogan:

  WE’RE AROUND AGAIN! AROUND THE WORLD, THAT IS!

  The inauguration date for the new globe-circling service was three weeks away, Ron reminded himself, and yet there was still much left to do.

  The dark mass of KOMO television’s front wall slid into place, and with a practiced rush of opened doors and a refreshing puff of cool, damp air, heavy with early-morning fog, the limousine driver delivered the airline president to the care of a studio technician. The man seated him in the comfortable chair of a talk-show set and fussed over an earpiece as he clipped a tiny microphone to Ron’s tie.

  “Where do I look?” Ron asked.

  “Right in the camera, Mr. Lamb. Charlie Gibson will be doing the interview,” the floor director said, as he studied Ron Lamb’s forehead and responded automatically, dabbing at a shiny spot with a cosmetic powder brush he’d seemingly produced from midair. “You won’t be able to see Mr. Gibson,” he continued, “but you’ll hear him in your earpiece. Just imagine he’s behind that lens, and please don’t glance around the studio. We wouldn’t want you to look shifty.”

  “I can’t see him?”

  “No, sir. We could hook up a monitor for you, but there’s a delay of as much as a second between what you hear and what you see, and it drives people nuts. Trust me.”

  “No problem.”

  Ron glanced around the darkened studio. There were several bright studio lights shining in his eyes, but the house lights in the background were turned off. The empty gallery of bleacher seats lining one side of the huge room looked brooding and disapproving, heightening his sense of impending stage fright.

  He began concentrating on the briefing paper provided by Ralph Basanji, and that triggered a mental review of the past week.

  The meeting with the financial community in New York had been an inquisition, but he’d pulled it off—or so the feedback had confirmed. The rumors, which had been echoing like a gunshot in the Grand Canyon, had put the Street on alert. But since nothing had happened to validate those rumors, Ron’s performance had quieted the waters for the moment. Elizabeth Sterling couldn’t arrive a moment too soon, and Ron reminded himself that she’d be landing in Seattle this very evening to take over the financial reins at last.