Afterburners!”
She scanned the overhead panel again, near where the ignitor switches had been. She raised her arm and gave Berry a thumbs-up.
“Hit the switches!” He paused for a split second and said, “Then get into position to ditch.”
Crandall hit the four switches.
Berry heard and felt a two-phased thud as the after-burners kicked in. He had no idea what would happen next.
Crandall called to Linda. “Put your head down! Like this.” Crandall hunched over into a crash position, as well as she could with the copilot’s wheel in front of her. Before she put her head down, she glanced up to see if Linda had done the same.
Berry felt the slight sensation of being pressed against his seat. The Straton was accelerating as fuel was injected directly into the jet exhausts and ignited to give extra thrust to the engines. The prestall airframe buffeting lessened, and he pulled farther back on the control wheel. The nose came up, and the ocean seemed to sink beneath his windshield. The stall alarm voice sounded one more time, then stopped. The altimeter showed 100 feet and climbing. “We’re climbing! We’re climbing! We’re lifting!”
Sharon Crandall picked her head up. She felt the increased Gs against her body as the aircraft rose. “Oh, God. Dear God.” Tears ran down her cheeks.
Berry held the control column with his left hand, reached his right hand out, and spread his fingers over the four engine throttles. For the first time since he had climbed into the flight chair, he was in control.
He called out to Sharon Crandall. “Afterburners-off.”
She reached up and shut them down.
The Straton decelerated slightly and Berry worked the four throttles, feeling the aircraft accelerate again. He watched the engine temperature and pressure gauges rise and the altimeter needle move upward. Five hundred feet, six hundred. Berry sat back. The unknown terrors of flying the airliner, like most unknown terrors, had been exaggerated.
No one spoke. All the lights in the cockpit came back on, and most of the warning lights extinguished. Outside, the violent storm raged above them, but at their lower altitude it produced no more than rain and manageable winds. John Berry cleared his throat. “We’re heading home. Sharon, Linda, are you both all right?”
The girl answered in a weak voice. “I’m not feeling good.”
Crandall released her seat belt, stood, and stepped over the girl. She noticed that her own legs were wobbling. She took the girl’s face in her hands. “Just a little airsick, honey. You’ll be all right in a minute. Take a lot of deep breaths. There.”
Berry recognized the automatic words of the veteran flight attendant, but the tone was sincere.
Crandall leaned over and gave Berry a light kiss on the cheek, then slid back into the copilot’s chair without a word.
Berry concentrated on the instruments. He let the Straton come up to 900 feet, then leveled out before they rose into the bottom of the thunderstorm.
He listened for sounds from the lounge, but heard nothing that penetrated the noise of the rain, the hum of electronics, or the droning of the jet engines.
He shut off the windshield wipers, experimented with the flight control for a few minutes, then reached out and reengaged the autopilot. The amber light went off, and he released the wheel and the throttles and took his feet off the pedals. He flexed his hands and stretched his arms, then turned to Sharon. “That was about as close as it comes. You were very cool.”
“Was I? I don’t remember. I think I remember screaming.” She looked closely at him. “John… what happened? You didn’t do something
… no… I read the message.”
“Neither you nor I did anything wrong… except to listen to them.”
“What…?”
The alerting bell rang.
They looked at each other, then stared down at the data-link screen. TO FLIGHT 52: DO YOU READ? ACKNOWLEDGE. SAN FRANCISCO HQ. Berry motioned toward the console. “Those bastards. Those sons-of- bitches.”
Crandall looked at him, then back at the message. She had not had time to think clearly about what had happened, and had not yet come to terms with what she’d thought about, but her half-formed conclusions suddenly crystallized. “John… how could they…? I mean, how could… why…?”
“God, I can’t believe what an idiot I’ve been. Hawaii. That should have been my tip-off. Shift the center of gravity. Fuel gauges. Those goddamned lying sons-of-bitches.”
Crandall was still trying to understand all that had happened. “That was partly my fault. I talked you into-”
“No. I trusted them too. But I shouldn’t have. I should have known. I did know, goddamn it.”
“But why? Why, in the name of God, would they do that?”
“They don’t want”-Berry jerked his thumb over his shoulder-“ them back.”
Crandall nodded. She’d thought of that for some time, but never pursued the thought to its natural conclusion. “What are we going to do? What are we going to answer them?”
“ Answer? I’m not going to answer anything.”
“No, John. Answer them. Tell them we know what they tried to do.”
Berry considered, then shook his head. “Someone who is trying to kill us has control of the situation down there. Someone in that tight little room off the Dispatch Office. Talking to the man-or men-in that room is like shouting to the man who just pushed you into the water that you’re drowning. I’m not going to tip them off that we’re still alive. That’s our secret, and we’ll make the most of it.”
Crandall nodded reluctantly. “Yes, I suppose. God, I wish we could tell someone. If we don’t get back… no one will ever know.”
Berry thought about the data-link messages. He tried to reconstruct them in his mind. “Even if we do get back, we’ll have a hell of a time trying to make anyone believe us. It would be our word against theirs, and we are the ones who suffered decompression, and we are the ones who can’t understand or follow the instructions of trained personnel.”
Sharon Crandall was beginning to get a very clear picture. “Those bastards. Oh, those bastards. Damn them.” She tried to imagine who in the Trans-United hierarchy would be capable of something like this. A few names came to mind, but she decided it could be anyone with enough to lose by having the Straton come back.
Berry was thinking of motives. “They probably don’t want to have to admit that their airport security was bad. They’ll discredit the bomb message we sent them-if they even bothered to pass it on, and try to pin it on someone or something else. The Straton Corporation. Structural failure. What a bunch of conniving, immoral bastards.”
“God, I can’t wait to get back and… But are they going to believe us?”
“We have to remember what we read, and believe that what we remember is correct.”
Linda Farley spoke. “We can show them the words printed on the paper.”
Crandall couldn’t follow what the girl was saying. “Did you understand what we were talking about?”
“Yes.”
Berry kept his eyes on the control panel and spoke to her. “Those men in San Francisco lied to us, Linda. They tried to… they told us things that would make us crash. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“What words?” asked Crandall.
“In the back. Near where I was sleeping before. It’s sitting in a little door on the wall, and it printed while you were typing and-”
“John! There’s a printer at the rear of the cockpit! I forgot about it.” She tore off her seat belt and jumped down from the flight chair. She moved quickly to the aft bulkhead and peered into a space in the corner near the fuselage wall. “Here it is.” She reached in and tore the narrow sheet from the printer, then grabbed a stack of folded messages from a collecting basket. She held them up and stretched them out. “John! It’s all here. Everything.”
Berry found that he was smiling. Nothing, he admitted, is as sweet as revenge. “Let me see them.”
