Skyhook

by John J. Nance

“The postal service never comes at this hour, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Which means it was a registered letter, which means it’s from the FAA, which means it’s very bad news.”

  April looked at the letter in her hands as she slid onto the side of the bed and nodded. “I’ve got Gracie and our aviation lawyer, a Mr. Greene, on the phone. They want to talk to you.”

  “Let me see the letter,” Arlie said quietly as he lifted it from her hands and opened it, scanning the text before handing it back and nodding to the phone. His face was ashen, but his voice was steady.

  “Okay, April. Put them on.”

  OFFICES OF JANSSEN AND PAUZAN, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  Gracie O’Brien ended the conference call between Ted Greene and the Rosens and immediately redialed Greene’s Washington office.

  “I need a straight assessment, Mr. Greene.”

  There was a long sigh from D.C. “Well, to be blunt, we’ve got a hell of a mess here.”

  Gracie felt her heart sink. On the conference call, Greene had said all the right and cautious things a good lawyer should say to a new client at the start of an unknown legal journey, but she’d expected a slightly more optimistic lawyer-to-lawyer statement.

  “They’re gunning for him, Gracie. I mean, FAA tends to get that way, as we both know, when it gets to enforcement actions. But I couldn’t get even the most cursory cooperation in Captain Rosen’s case. It’s as if they’ve made an agency decision to go for broke and destroy him.”

  “What can we do? I mean … Okay, that’s a dumb question for co-counsel to ask.”

  “No, not really. The nexus of their righteous indignation is the theory that Captain Rosen simply flew the aircraft into the water, negligently. Everything else stems from that. But the drinking charge is very serious, and could be disastrous. Now, if the hospital did a blood test when Rosen was admitted, a zero blood-alcohol result would help.”

  “You need me to call Anchorage?”

  “One of my staff is already on it. Keep your fingers crossed.”

  “I will. He wasn’t drinking.”

  “The charge that he violated visual flight rules is hogwash, but it may be the most dangerous one of all, since they can create havoc by saying that he flew too far into instrument conditions without a clearance. I listened carefully to the recording of that hospital interview, and Captain Rosen, unfortunately, left the door open a crack for them with the way he described the conditions.”

  “But, he tried to turn around.”

  “Not soon enough. They’ll say he spent too much time on the radio calling for an instrument clearance.”

  Gracie was tapping a pencil against her blotter in a frantic beat. “Oh, damn, damn, damn. You say the reckless charge is the worst?”

  “Their word and interpretation against his.”

  “But what about the propeller?”

  “That, unfortunately, is what I’m leading up to. We need to recover enough of that wreckage to at least show the prop blade is missing. That’s our best defense. Of course, they’ll claim it came off on impact with the water, but I seriously doubt that will sway a hearing examiner. We need that wreckage, regardless of what it costs to salvage it.”

  She rubbed her head and sighed. “I’ll get to work on it.”

  “Gracie, I know you’re a family friend. How long does Captain Rosen have till retirement? Is early retirement an option?”

  “Not only no, but hell no. He’s only forty-nine. He’ll fight to his last penny, and even when they retire him someday, he’ll be flying privately. I fully expect to see him flying into his nineties.”

  “First we have to get his license back.”

  “And there is, I assume, no chance of getting this so-called emergency revocation reversed quickly?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  SEQUIM, WASHINGTON

  Answering the home phone on the first ring was an unconscious habit, and April pulled the receiver to her ear unprepared for the slightly familiar male voice on the other end.

  “Mrs. Rosen?”

  “Ms. Rosen. Who is this?”

  “Walter Harrison of the FAA. I have a message for Captain Rosen.”

  “You need to talk to his team of lawyers, Mr. Harrison. You won’t get away with this outrage, by the way. I’d plan an early retirement if I were you.”

  There was a malevolent chuckle on the other end. “In denial, are we, Ms. Rosen? Well, you want to believe that dear old dad couldn’t be drinking, and I understand your misguided loyalty. But I’ve found the proof, no pun intended.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “He visited a liquor store in Anchorage just before the accident, which means the charges are valid and his days of imperiling passengers are over. Undoubtedly the empty bottles will be in the wreckage. A fifth of bourbon, two bottles of vodka—the alcoholic’s friend—a bottle of Jamaican rum, and a very fine cognac. All that booze was purchased an hour before departure from Lake Spenard, and he signed the credit card receipt himself.”

  He paused, but April was too stunned to reply.

  “I know you think I’m just a little worm, Ms. Rosen. But the truth is, your father’s a dangerous drunk.”

  “You go to hell!” she snapped, slamming the phone back in the receiver and feeling her entire body quake. She lifted the receiver to call Gracie, then replaced it again, a cancerous doubt creeping into her mind. Why would he buy that much liquor? Why would a recovering alcoholic buy any liquor? She felt the growing need to find him, talk to him, and reassure herself, but he was nowhere to be found in the house. A light showed through the window of the detached, barn-like garage, and she pushed through the back door to find him on a stool in his woodworking shed.

  “Dad?”

  Arlie Rosen looked around at her, trying to smile through an expression of utter despair. There was an object on the workbench in front of him, and April realized with a twinge of fear that it was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, blessedly unopened.

  “Dad, what are you doing out here?”

  He sighed, a long, ragged sigh, and tapped the workbench. “Looking my old enemy in the eye, April.”

  “Dad, you’re not thinking …”

  “Of drinking?” he finished, chuckling at the rhyme. He shook his head and picked up the bottle with his left hand, turning it slowly. “No, honey. I’m just wondering why that little FAA bastard hates me so. Because I had a bout with the bottle ten years ago? Or was I right about his being a rejected airline applicant with a vendetta?”

  “He called, Dad.”

  “Who?”

  “Harrison.” She related the conversation, watching her father’s expression harden.

  “That isn’t true, Dad, is it? You … weren’t in any liquor store, were you?”

  He looked away, nearly a minute passing before she heard an answer. “Yes, dammit.” He snapped his eyes back to her. “Your mother is witness to this, April. The liquor was not for me. We entertained on the airplane often when we were moored someplace, and I was planning to see some friends in Sitka on arrival.”

  “This doesn’t help us, Dad.”

  “I wasn’t drinking!”

  “It’s okay, Dad.”

  “No, it’s not. Forget the stupid liquor charge, what matters is, my reputation’s just been assassinated, my plane is gone, I could have killed us, and even your trust has been shaken, and …” His right hand flailed the air as he fought the emotion.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” April prompted.

  “April, I’m a senior airman. I should have turned around immediately. I should have climbed. I should have seen that fog bank, gotten a better weather briefing … something, goddammit! I’m in command, and I do not have the luxury of making mistakes!”

  “Dad, you’re human.”

  “No!” he said, raising his index finger, his eyes flaring. “No, I can’t hide behind being human. I’m an airline captain. I’m required to be perfect, or
at the very least to keep my own stupidity from … from …” Arlie hurled the unopened bottle of bourbon at the concrete wall of the shop where it shattered loudly as he finished the sentence. “… crashing my aircraft!”

  She tried to move to him, but he was already off the stool and out the door, striding across the manicured lawn toward a grove of trees on a high embankment overlooking the strait.

  April watched him go, utterly unsure what to do, her mind maliciously replaying teenage memories of finding empty bottles of vodka in strange parts of their house before he enrolled himself in the airline’s alcohol program. She had never smelled liquor on his breath back then. True alcoholics could be very difficult to detect.

  And the Anchorage purchase had included vodka.

  NINETEEN

  THURSDAY, DAY 4 ELMENDORF AFB, ALASKA 8:40 A.M.

  “There. What’s that?” General MacAdams orbited the shadowy radar return on the screen with the red dot from his tiny laser pen.

  “Not sure, sir,” a sergeant replied. “This is from one of our air-defense sites.”

  “Looks like a fast-moving target to me,” Mac added.

  Sergeant Jacobs, an AWACS air-traffic control specialist normally charged with keeping fighters and tankers headed in the right direction, approached the screen, scratching his chin before turning back to the man operating the liquid crystal projector.

  “Run it again, Jim.”

  Once more the picture came to life, and once again the shadowy target appeared, disappeared, and reappeared on subsequent sweeps of the radar beam.

  Jacobs turned to the general. “Well, sir, of seven tapes, that’s the only hint I see of an unidentified fast-mover where your guy descended below two thousand feet. All the tapes show the skin paint return of the jet until … here.” He used his own laser pointer to highlight a spot considerably west and on the left margin of the screen. “But this is the only tape I’ve seen that was getting hits on him while he was within a hundred feet of the water.”

  “And we’re all in agreement that there’s no other conflicting traffic visible?”

  Everyone in the room nodded except for Lieutenant Colonel Anderson. “Ah, General, there’s still the Coast Guard tape we haven’t seen.”

  “Sir,” the sergeant interjected. “There is one other target on this tape that’s of interest. It’s intermittent and running north, where your jet is running east. We had him intermittently on the AWACS tapes, too. While our Gulfstream is coming in from the left side of the scope, this fellow’s coming in from the bottom … the south. He first appears down here, and the radar is picking up his transponder squawking twelve hundred, the visual flight code, and his altitude is coming through as two hundred feet. Now that’s, as I say, at the bottom of the screen—remember the top is oriented to north—and at this point it’s about twenty miles south of the estimated position of the Albatross crash site. I’m assuming this is the Albatross, right here where you see this smudge. That’s the faint radar return, and it’s northbound.”

  “Could that be that ship we talked about?” Mac asked, then winced and corrected himself. “Of course not. Sorry. Dumb question. The tanker was southbound.”

  “Yes, sir, and this northbound VFR hit is probably going at least a hundred knots, so it sure as heck isn’t a ship.”

  “But, the two don’t intersect, do they?” Mac asked with some alarm. “The track of our Gulfstream coming in from the left crosses or will eventually cross the northbound track of the target you believe is the Albatross, but will they be there at the same time?” Mac was sitting forward now, his concern rising until the sergeant shook his head.

  “No, sir. I projected their respective tracks, and with the time-line information we have on the Gulfstream from the flight data recorder, they come close, but miss by several miles.”

  “Good.”

  “Provided, sir, that the Albatross doesn’t change his heading.”

  “But, you’d see a change, right?”

  Jacobs was shaking his head no. “Well, he probably didn’t change course, but we only have a good track on him until about ten miles south of the estimated crash site, and then he apparently dropped too low, or something happened to his transponder, because we have no hits on him after that. That means we can only project his subsequent flight path, but when I do, it misses your Gulfstream by miles.”

  “Do we have that Coast Guard radar tape?” Mac asked.

  “Yes, sir. Racking it up now,” the sergeant answered.

  Once again a series of computer-generated images filled the screen, this time of surface vessels in the form of large targets crawling along sea lanes into and out of Prince William Sound. Jacobs consulted a briefing sheet sent with the tape and studied the screen for a few seconds before highlighting an area south of Valdez.

  “Again, this is approximately the crash site, sir, based on rescue data cross-referenced to emergency locator data, corrected for … I guess they call it the prevailing currents. It pretty well matches the projection of the Albatross’s flight path from the previous tape.”

  “How close can we come to a time for the crash of that Albatross?” Mac asked.

  Jacobs was shaking his head. “Unknown, sir, from the data I’ve got.”

  Mac was on his feet, stretching as he pointed to the screen. “Sergeant, run that through on fast forward and see if you see anything we need to see. We’ll be pacing around the hallway.”

  Mac and Anderson had barely reached the Coke machine down the corridor when the sergeant stuck his head out the door.

  “General? You gentlemen need to see this.” They followed him back inside.

  “Remember, this is a surface radar,” the sergeant said. “It’s not like our aviation radars that really can’t effectively track someone below a thousand feet.”

  “Understood,” Mac said, more impatiently than he’d intended.

  “Okay,” the sergeant said. “Watch this target appear from the south margins of the coverage area. See it moving north?”

  Mac nodded.

  “How fast?” Anderson asked.

  “I estimate around a hundred twenty to a hundred forty. The Coast Guard system doesn’t put data blocks on air traffic. Here’s that huge tanker over to the northwest of the target, about eight miles at this point. And you can see several other sizable vessels down here in the same vicinity the Albatross is approaching.”

  “Okay. So you believe that’s the … whoa!” Mac said as a new target rushed in from the left side of the screen at twice the speed, its radar return a crisp white blotch closing on the northbound track of what had to be the Albatross. “Slow that down,” Mac commanded.

  The tape was slowed to quarter-speed, the respective radar tracks showing the Albatross and the Gulfstream closing on each other every four seconds with each sweep of the radar beam.

  “Our guy is running without lights, of course,” Anderson muttered, and Mac nodded. “We weren’t supposed to be just fifty feet over the water, or out of our own control area.”

  “There’s the oil tanker,” Jacobs added, using his laser pointer. “If you extend the Gulfstream’s track dead on another five miles, it intersects the tanker.”

  “What’s that?” Mac asked, flashing his own pointer on the screen at a spot north-northeast of the Albatross, but barely a hair’s breadth south of the approaching Gulfstream’s west-to-east track.

  “That’s another ship, I think,” Jacobs replied. “The Albatross will pass to the west of it. Looks like a large enough return to be a large freighter or cruise ship.”

  “Good Lord,” Mac said, his eyes on the screen. “Our Gulfstream’s going to barely miss whatever it is.”

  Jacobs was nodding. “Sir, look at this. Remember we couldn’t track the Albatross on the other tape inside ten miles? Look at him here at eight miles out on the Coast Guard tape. He’s changing course. Right here. See? He’s changing course to the east by … twenty degrees. That completely alters the equation. He’s now headed square
ly for that freighter, and … the point at which the Albatross’s projected flight path will cross our Gulfstream’s flight path has moved east, and … I’m trying to figure out the time, but they’re going to arrive at that intersection about the same time.”

  General MacAdams, Lieutenant Colonel Anderson, and the two sergeants watched transfixed as the targets converged on each other, the Albatross’s radar return disappearing for several sweeps of the radar beam as it approached the unidentified new ship, then reappearing brightly on the north side of the ship just as the Gulfstream’s target crossed the same point.

  “Here the Gulfstream seems to be in a right turn,” the sergeant said.

  “He was climbing. He’d unlocked the computer and pulled up.”

  “Okay, the Albatross continues on for two sweeps of the radar and then appears to slow and get more faint … finally disappearing, probably when he sinks.”

  “Again, please,” Mac asked as the tape was rewound slightly and the point of convergence played once more.

  After the fourth repetition Mac sat back and shook his head, his mind accelerating into the problem. “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dammit, Jon, you said they weren’t that close.”

  “I … told you, sir, the best I had at the time. That isn’t the same position the Coast Guard plotted as the crash site.”

  Sergeant Jacobs was consulting the note sent with the tape. “They apparently noticed this too, sir. They’ve got the corrected coordinates on this note. And … remember I warned you that my projections were based on no turns.”

  Mac waved them down. “Don’t worry, fellows, I’m not looking to blame anyone for anything. But now we’ve got a potential problem.”

  “The tapes don’t have to leave here alive, General,” Jon Anderson said.

  “Not the point, Jon. The FAA’s trying to string up that pilot and this shows he could have hit not one but two objects out there.”

  “Well, what was he doing that low, y’know?” Anderson asked.

  “He’s flying a bloody seaplane, Jon. You have to get low to find the sea. No, the question we’ve got to grapple with is whether or not there’s any chance the Albatross hit our Gulfstream.”