Day Zero (34 page)

Q
uinn had no idea if the bomb was on a timer or would be detonated by hand. Either way, he had to get up to 12A before he could do anything about it. Since the hijackings of September 11, 2001, airline passengers had taken on a new responsibility over their own safety. Gone were the days when a lone crazy man could stand and threaten a bunch of sheep that would stay obediently in their seats. Past disturbances had demonstrated that this new passenger mentality would not hesitate to run a would-be hijacker over with the drink cart or otherwise beat him to a pulp and restrain him with belts and neckties.

The problem for Quinn was that few people on the plane knew he was one of the good guys. They’d seen him running back and forth with Carly, but nerves were on edge and trust was at a premium. Without some form of help, there was a good chance he’d be stopped and pummeled in the aisle before he even made it to the stairs, let alone the bomb.

Carly, recognizable and trusted in her red-and-white Global Airlines uniform, walked up the right-hand aisle of the aircraft, a few paces ahead of Quinn, who moved up the left toward his seat. The captain hadn’t announced an emergency but the seat belt sign was illuminated and everyone was aware of at least one murder on the plane. Now their stomachs told them the plane was diving toward the ocean. Hands reached out for Carly’s attention, wanting an explanation. She did her best to wave them off, reassuring them everything was okay, and letting them know Quinn was on their side.

The noise of a commotion came from beyond the front bulkhead by the time Quinn neared his seat. A frenzied scream of “Fire!” sent a wave of panic up and down the plane.

Quinn knew better. A fire on a plane could be catastrophic, but the smell of it would be apparent pretty quickly. This was a diversion. He stooped next to his assigned seat, reaching under the tray table to remove the pins holding the metal arm in place. The commotion grew louder and Quinn glanced up to see a tall Asian man pushing a drink cart down the aisle as fast as he could directly toward him. A simple T-shirt showed the powerful arms and shoulders of a young athlete. A determined frown creased his lips.

Quinn yanked the metal tray arm, snapping off the last two inches but giving him a serviceable dogleg-shaped club nearly eighteen inches long. Not wanting to be in the aisle or crammed against the seat back in front of him, Quinn jumped up on his seat cushion with both feet, yelling for the young couple in the row ahead of him to move to the left. They complied, cramming themselves next to the window and giving Quinn room to shove the seat back forward and step around the cart as it rolled by. The Chinese man backpedaled when he saw Quinn’s weapon, smiling maniacally as he produced a weapon of his own, a foot-long bread knife from first class. It was blunt on the end, but a middle-aged Russian man tried to grab the hijacker by the sleeve and got a quick lesson on how sharp the blade was with a deep gash that removed the top half of his ear.

Swinging the knife with his right hand, the hijacker unfurled a seat belt extender with his left, whipping the heavy buckle with great effect to strike any passengers that tried to stop him. Quinn had seen a
liu xing chui
or dragon’s fist used in demonstrations by Shaolin monks before. A metal weight on the end of a chain, they could burst a skull like a melon in the hands of a skilled user—which this guy apparently was.

Another passenger tried to intervene as the hijacker went by. This one was a young African American. His bearing and the way he moved made Quinn think he might be a soldier. It didn’t matter. The hijacker flicked the heavy buckle behind him, dropping the young man like a sack of sand with a deft pop to the temple.

Passengers fell like wheat before a sickle to the speed and precision of his weapons.

Quinn jumped into the aisle. The brakes on the cart had activated when the hijacker let go, causing it to stop directly behind Quinn’s seat, blocking any chance of escape. Quinn shoved it backwards with his hip, giving himself a few extra feet of room to maneuver.

Popeye’s mouth hung open. He looked like he wanted to crawl out the wall of the airplane when Quinn yanked up the seat cushion and slid it over his left arm, holding it in front of himself like a shield. The two fighters advanced on each other quickly, Quinn’s club crashing off the hijacker’s blade while the metal seat belt buckle pummeled the seat cushion shield, searching for an opening to Quinn’s skull.

Rather than taking a defensive posture, Quinn attacked through his opponent, driving him backwards. Seemingly startled by Quinn’s ferocity, the man retreated in the aisle. The soft foam of the seat cushion disrupted his timing with the makeshift dragon’s fist. Focused on the moment of battle, he lost sight of Carly until she appeared behind the hijacker, directly in his path. Quinn kept up his assault, yelling for her to get out of the way.

The hijacker feinted with the knife, hoping to draw out the club. Instead, Quinn countered with the seat cushion shield deflecting the weapons long enough to chop downward with the metal club, smashing the bones in the hijacker’s wrist and causing him to drop the seat belt extension. His wrist was badly injured, but he still had the blade.

He must have sensed Carly coming up behind him because he spun, grabbing her with the injured wrist and bringing the blade up toward her throat.

Fighting in the confined space of the aisle made any sort of strategy but direct assault nearly impossible. Over the years, Quinn had made every partner he’d ever worked with promise to come in with guns blazing if he or his family were ever taken hostage. He’d made a pact to do the same, not waiting for negotiators or SWAT teams and lengthy standoffs. Quinn had seen too many times to ignore that a lightning-fast counterattack on the heels of the first assault almost always beat prolonged peace talks. He could wait for the guy to get set with the knife to Carly’s throat and then play a little game of standoff while both men postured and Carly fought a meltdown. Or, he could go all Samson on this guy and take his metal jawbone of an ass and beat the man’s hip and thigh before he had a chance to settle.

He chose the latter—but before he could move, the sharp clap of an explosion shook the aircraft, causing it to shudder as if they’d hit another set of turbulence.

Quinn felt as if a sumo wrestler had jumped on his chest as the air was sucked out of his lungs. He exhaled instinctively, knowing there was a danger of an embolism if he held his breath. Books, napkins, and bits of clothing flew by on a great, sucking gust of wind that rushed forward in an explosive decompression. The air chilled in an instant. A thick vapor formed in the cabin, like the space in the top of a soda bottle when the lid is twisted half open. Plastic oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, dangling like yellow ornaments amid an immediate heavy fog.

A half a breath later, the plane began to dive.

Quinn’s stomach rose up with a chorus of screams from terrified passengers. He had no idea if the pilots would be able to regain control, but decided to continue fighting until they hit the ground. He didn’t know their altitude, but guessed he had less than a minute before he blacked out from lack of oxygen. He’d performed well during hypoxia drills during pilot aptitude tests at the Academy, but naming face cards was a far cry from facing an armed hijacker.

One moment, Quinn found himself trapped in the aisle; the next he found himself in a zero-G environment, floating above the seats as his body fell at the same rate as the airplane. Kicking off the seat back beside him, he crashed into Carly, surprising the hijacker. The blade fell away as he flailed out, trying to grab something, anything to stabilize the falling sensation. Quinn peeled Carly aside and rained down blows with the tray table arm, knocking the man’s jaw out of place and breaking his other arm.

The hijacker suddenly shoved Carly on top of a row of panicked Russians and lowered his hands to his sides. A resigned smile spread across his face. The bomb had gone off. His job was done. Quinn finished him with a blow to the temple.

Frantic cries of passengers mixed with the scream of rushing wind as the cabin pressure equalized through the hole torn somewhere up front by the bomb. The fog began to clear almost as soon as it had formed, revealing the scenes of panic and terror among the passengers.

The Airbus began to rumble louder, engines groaning as the pilot picked up the nose, arresting the dive. Quinn fell in the next instant as if dropped from invisible fingers, on top of a dazed Carly.

His face against hers, Quinn pushed himself upright, searching for a free oxygen mask. With all the air flowing out of the plane there seemed to be none left to breathe. They were still extremely high where the air was thin and cold. Quinn knew he would need oxygen in a matter of seconds. No amount of physical training could keep him from passing out if he couldn’t breathe.

Behind him, above the fray of wind and terrified passengers, he heard Mattie scream.

C
aptain Rob took a long pull from his full-face oxygen mask once he regained control of the airplane. First Officer McBott did the same.

The concussion from the bomb had knocked out flight control, sending the plane into a nosedive until Szymanski had been able to wrestle her back into submission. There were redundant automatic systems, but the bomb had damaged those as well.

Every claxon, buzzer, and bell on the console had activated at once. A computerized voice, affectionately known as “Bitchin’ Betty,” warned of a pressurization failure in the hull.

“No shit,” the captain muttered, and pushed the button to silence that little slice of noise.

Both men had their hands on the controls. Above even checking on the safety of the passengers in the back, their first priority was to make sure they didn’t fall out of the sky. No amount of knowledge or radioing for help would do anyone any good if they stopped flying the airplane.

Aviate, navigate—then communicate
. It was a pilot’s mantra during an emergency.

“All engines are showing good,” McBott said, running down the various systems to make certain they were functional.

“She’s sluggish,” the captain said, “but still responding. I’m taking her on down to one zero thousand.”

His Air Force flight instructors had drilled into him the three most useless things to a pilot: altitude above you, the runway behind you, and fuel that was still on the ground. All of that was well and good until you were hurtling through the air in an aluminum tube with a hole in it—and that altitude was trying to kill everyone on board. Ten thousand feet would give him a couple of miles over the ocean to play with, but make the ride a hair less deadly.

“Flight level one zero thousand,” McBott repeated, his voice muffled by the oxygen mask. He shot a sideways glance at Szymanski. “St. Paul Island is still 141 miles off the nose,” he said.

“One-four-one,” the captain repeated. “Roger that.” Both men dispensed with any of their usual banter, not wanting to clutter up what they had to do with unnecessary words. And, Szymanski thought, depending on the size of the hole in his airplane, the odds were pretty high that their entire conversation would be played back off the flight data recorder after divers recovered it from the bottom of the ocean.

The plane shuddered again, as if to punctuate his fears. McBott’s voice came across the intercom.

“We just lost number four,” he said.

“Dammit!” Szymanski felt the airplane slow noticeably at the sudden loss of power. “Restart procedures,” he said.

“Roger that,” McBott said. “Doing it now.” His voice was strained as if he were keeping the plane in the air by sheer force of will.

The captain pulled back on the controls to raise the nose slightly. Satisfied he’d slowed their descent rate enough to keep from ripping the wings off, he flipped the switch from intercom to radio.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” he said, issuing his first emergency message roughly fifty seconds after the explosion. “Global 105 heavy—”

A second bang rattled the airplane, interrupting his transmission. A horrific clattering noise on the port side followed immediately on its heels.

“We’ve lost number three as well,” McBott said, already running through the restart procedure.

The Airbus yawed dramatically to the left as the working engines on the right wing shoved her around. It took a moment for the computers to catch up and adjust the rudder and ailerons to compensate for the asymmetrical thrust. Szymanski checked his descent, leveling off at fifteen thousand feet, knowing he might need the extra altitude to make it to a runway now that he was crabbing along on two engines. It wasn’t pretty, but they were still flying—for the moment.

Where there should have been the quiet roar of two powerful Rolls-Royce engines, there was only an eerie silence out the left side of the airplane. The smell of jet fuel permeated the cabin air, along with another odor that sent sweat running down Szymanski’s back and caused him to gag in his oxygen mask. It was the smell of burning flesh.

“Okay,” the captain said. “I have the airplane. Get on the horn and see if you can get anyone from the crew to give us a report.”

Juanita’s voice came across the interphone. She had to yell to be heard over the roar of wind. There was an incessant rattle in the background and Szymanski found himself wondering just how much of his airplane was falling off.

“The bomb took a twelve-foot section of the fuselage from front bulkhead on the upper deck to about row 10,” she yelled. “A beverage cart and part of the floor went with it. I can see down to the main deck, but I’m strapped in so I’m not sure what the condition is.”

“Injuries?” McBott said, looking across at the captain as they processed the idea that there was a gaping hole in the side of the plane.

“Five passengers on the upper deck went out when the bomb went off. I’m not sure about the main deck. Andre was standing in the aisle . . .” As strong and businesslike as Juanita was, her voice faltered when she spoke of the death of one of her crew. “Captain, I think he got sucked into one of the engines.”

The term was FOD. Foreign Object Debris—like birds or a human body—entering a jet engine could trash the heavy blades, rendering them instantaneously useless. But it was the beverage cart that frightened Szymanski the most. The heavy chunk of metal and cans of soda could do a number on the skin of his airplane. He couldn’t tell if the rip in its skin was making the plane shake so badly, or if it was something worse.

“Juanita,” Szymanski said. “I need you to get where you can look out at the left wing and tell me what you see.”

“Okay . . .”

There was an unearthly silence on the interphone as Juanita went to do as he asked. For a time Szymanski was worried that she had been sucked out of the plane as well.

“Captain.” She came back on when he’d just about given up hope. “I’m not sure, but I think I’m seeing some pretty significant cracks in the wings.”

Szymanski fought the urge to punch something. “Take the pistol,” he said to McBott. “And go back and look for yourself. I hate to put this on you, but we’ve got a decision to make and we have to make it pretty damned fast. Do we keep flying until the wing falls off and have a hundred percent chance of killing every soul on board . . .”

McBott nodded, finishing his sentence. “Or risk a water landing while we still have a wing.”

“There’s no such thing as a water landing, son,” the captain said. “Only crashing into the ocean. The odds are better than crashing with one wing, but not by much.”