Mayday (2 page)

“Really? I hope I have one of the better ones on the flight home.”

“I hope you do.”

The old woman finally stepped aside and the flight attendant trudged up the stairway. Strands of “As Time Goes By” floated
down to O’Neil over the normal inflight noises. With each step the singing of the more gregarious passengers got louder.

When O’Neil reached the top of the staircase, she frowned. Three of the male passengers stood arm-in-arm around the piano.
So far, they were content to sing softly. But she knew that whenever men acted openly chummy while they were still sober,
they were certain to become especially loud after they began to drink. Alcohol released the Irish tenor in them. O’Neil knew
they would soon get their chance, since she was supposed to open the bar in a few minutes. She wished the airline would go
back to the old-fashioned lounge instead of the aerial nightclub.

“Hello,” O’Neil called to the young piano player. She could not recall if his name was Hogan or Grogan. He was too young for
her anyway. She edged her way around half-a-dozen passengers, across the heavily carpeted lounge, and toward the cockpit.
With the tray balanced in her hands, she tapped against the fiberglass door with the toe of her shoe. She could see from the
shadow that someone in the cockpit had leaned up against the door’s tiny section of one-way glass to see who had knocked.

Carl Fessler unlocked the door for her, and O’Neil walked into the cockpit.

“Coffee is served, gentlemen.”

“The pastry is mine, Terri,” Stuart said.

Everyone took a plastic cup, and she handed Stuart the pastry dish.

Stuart turned to Fessler. “Carl, see if the passengers’ flight-connection information has come in yet.” Stuart glanced down
at the blank electronics screen on the pedestal between the two flight chairs. “Maybe we missed it on the screen.”

Fessler looked over his shoulder toward the right rear of the cockpit. He had left the data-link printer’s door open. The
message tray was still empty. “Nothing, Skipper.”

Stuart nodded. “If we don’t get that connection information soon,” he said to Terri O’Neil, “I’ll send another request.”

“Very good,” said O’Neil. “Some of the first-class passengers are getting nervous. Having a printout of connection updates
works even better than giving them Valium.” While she spoke with the Captain, O’Neil could see out of the corner of her eye
that Fessler and McVary were looking at each other in a peculiar way, evidently conveying some sort of signal. Terri realized
that the First Officer and Second Officer were playing a game—and that she had become part of it. Boys. After everyone mumbled
his thanks, O’Neil left the flight deck and closed the door behind her.

Captain Stuart had waited for the coffee and pastry as though it were a special event—a milestone along a straight desert
highway. He ate the pastry slowly, then sat back to sip at his coffee. Of the three of them on the flight deck, only Stuart
remembered when everything they ate was served on real china. The utensils then were silver and the food was a little less
plastic as well. Now even the aromas were a weak imitation of what he had remembered as a new copilot. The whole cockpit smelled
different then. Real leather, hydraulic fluid, and old cigarettes; not the sterile aroma of acrylic paints and synthetic materials.

Alan Stuart’s mind wandered. He had flown for Trans-United for thirty-four years. He’d crossed the Pacific more than a thousand
times. He was a multimil-lion-miler, although supersonic speeds had made that yardstick meaningless. Now he was losing count
of his hours, miles, and number of crossings. He sighed, then took another sip from his plastic cup. “I don’t know where the
company buys this lousy coffee,” he said to no one in particular.

Fessler turned around. “If that’s a trivia question, the answer is Brazil.”

Stuart didn’t answer. In a few seconds his thoughts had slid comfortably back to where they had been. Supersonic transports
were not actually flown; they were just aimed and watched. What modern pilots did mostly was to type instructions into onboard
computers, and that was how actual flight tasks got accomplished. It had become such a passive job—until something went wrong.

In the old days, there was much more work, but much more fun. There were the long layovers in Sydney, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Some
days in the Straton he would sit in his twelve-mile-high perch and look down on the routes he had flown as a young man. Old
Boeing 707s—the original jets. And the captains that he had flown with had once flown the DC-4s, DC-6s and DC-7s on those
very routes. Even with the old 707, they needed to make refueling stops everywhere. The lighter passenger loads meant that
the flights operated only a few times each week, so they had several days’ layover in lots of remote and faraway places. Life,
he was certain, had been simpler yet more exciting then.

Carl Fessler tapped his pencil on the digital readout of the Total Airframe Temperature gauge. He was beginning another round
of required entries into the portable backup computer, entries of their mid-flight aircraft performance numbers. Records of
every sort, to be fed into the company mainframe computer and never to be seen again.

The Total Airframe Temperature needle sat on 189 degrees Fahrenheit, closing in on the red-line mark of 198. The operational
limits at 62,000 feet were always a matter of temperatures and pressures, reflected Fessler. The Straton transport’s skin
was not to exceed its designated limit. If necessary, Fessler would tell the Captain and he would slow the ship down. The
environment they operated in was hostile enough. Don’t press it. “What’s the capital of Japan?” he asked without looking up
from his paperwork.

McVary glanced over his shoulder. “Mount Fuji?”

“Close,” said Fessler. “But not close enough for you to try to land on it.” Fessler entered the final figures into the computer
and looked up at the windshield. Just beyond the glass and the aluminum-and-titanium alloy skin of the 797 was a slipstream
of air moving so fast that anything its friction touched was instantly heated to over 175 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet the actual
temperature of the atmosphere outside was 67 degrees below zero. The air itself was thin enough to be nonexistent. Less than
one pound per square inch—one-fifteenth the normal sea-level amount. The oxygen composition was less than one percent. The
mass was unbreathable anyway, since the pressure was too low to force the few oxygen molecules into the lungs. Subspace, reflected
Fessler. Subspace was not what he’d been hired for five years before. But here he was.

McVary suddenly sat erect in his seat and put down his coffee. “Skipper, what’s that?” He pointed to his right front. There
was a small dot on the horizon— hardly more than a speck against the cockpit glass.

Stuart sat up and put his face closer to the wind-shield.

Fessler put down his coffee and turned in his seat to look.

They watched the dot on the right side of the wind-shield. It was moving across their front, apparently at an oblique angle
to their flight path. It was growing slightly, but not alarmingly. It did not—at least for the moment—pose any threat of collision.

McVary relaxed a bit. “Must be a fighter. Some military jet jockey horsing around.”

Stuart nodded. “Right.” He reached into his flight bag and pulled out a pair of binoculars, a good set of Bausch & Lomb that
he had bought in Germany many years before. He carried it as an amusement. He used to watch ships, planes, and faraway coastlines
when he flew low enough to see something worth looking at. He’d meant to take them out of his bag long ago, but habit and
nostalgia—he’d seen a good deal of the world through them—had postponed the retirement of the glasses. He adjusted the focus
knob. “Can’t make it out.”

“Maybe it’s a missile,” McVary said. “A cruise missile.” He had been an Air Force pilot, and his mind still worked in that
direction.

Fessler half stood near his console. “Would they shoot it up here?”

“They’re not supposed to,” said McVary. “Not near commercial routes.” He paused. “We did deviate pretty far south today.”

Stuart twisted the focus knob again. “Lost it. Wait . . . Got it. . ..”

“Can you make it out, Skipper?” asked McVary, a slight edge to his voice.

“Funny-looking. Never seen anything like it. Some sort of missile, I think. I can’t tell. Here.” He handed the binoculars
to McVary. “You look.”

The ex–fighter pilot took the glasses. Even without them he could see that the object had gotten closer. To the naked eye
it appeared to be a sliver of dark-colored metal against the blue sky. He raised the glasses and adjusted them. There was
something very familiar about that object, but he couldn’t place it. It was hard to get a perspective on its size, but instinctively
he knew it was small. “Small,” he said aloud. “And at that speed and these altitudes it could only be military.”

Fessler stepped closer to the front windshield. “Whose military?”

McVary shrugged as he continued to scan. “The Martian Air Force, Carl. How the hell do I know?” He leaned farther forward.
For a brief, irrational moment he thought he might be seeing the opening salvo of an atomic war. The end of the world. No.
It was too low, too small, and going toward the open Pacific. “It’s got to be a jet fighter . . . but . . .”

“If it gets closer, we’ll turn,” Stuart said. Altering the course of a supersonic transport was no easy matter, however. At
cruise speed it would take him nearly four-and-a-half minutes to turn the 797 around, and during that time the ship would
have flown sixty-seven miles. At any greater rate of turn, the passengers would be subjected to an unacceptable level of positive
Gs. Those who were standing would be thrown to the floor. Those seated would be unable to move. He flipped on the switch for
the cabin seat-belt sign, then turned in his seat and wrapped his hands around the control wheel. His left thumb was poised
over the autopilot disengage button. He looked at the object on the horizon, then at his crew. The cockpit had changed quickly.
It was always that way. Nothing to do, or too much to do. He glanced at his relief copilot, who was still out of his seat
and looking out the window. “Fessler. Who played opposite Cary Grant in North by Northwest?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then get back in your seat and do something you do know. Sit down, strap in, get ready.”

“Yes, sir.”

Small beads of perspiration had begun to form on the Captain’s forehead. “I’m going to turn,” he said, but still did not press
the autopilot release button on his control wheel. Alan Stuart—like most commercial pilots—was reluctant to alter course,
speed, or altitude unless absolutely necessary. Jumping headlong into an unneeded evasive action was a student pilot’s stunt.

The fourth being in the cockpit—the autopilot— continued to maintain the 797’s heading and altitude.

The object was easily visible now. It was becoming apparent to Stuart that the mysterious missile was not on a collision course
with the Straton. If neither of the crafts altered course, the object would pass safely across their front. Captain Stuart
relaxed his grip on the control wheel but stayed ready to execute a turn toward the north if the object’s flight path changed.
He glanced at his wristwatch, which was still set to San Francisco time. It was exactly eleven o’clock.

McVary saw the object clearly now in the binoculars. “Oh, Christ!” His voice was a mixture of surprise and fear.

Captain Stuart experienced a long-forgotten but familiar sensation in his stomach. “What, what. . .?”

“It’s not a missile,” said McVary. “It’s a drone. A military target drone!”

At 10:44
A.M
. San Francisco time, the helmsman of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier
Chester W. Nimitz
made a three-degree course correction to starboard. Positioned 2,000 yards astern of the
Nimitz
was the cruiser
Belknap
and the destroyers
Coontz
and
Nicolas
. Their helmsmen also made appropriate corrections. The fleet steered a steady course of 135 degrees, making a headway of
18 knots. They rode serenely over the mid-Pacific, their position 900 miles north of Hawaii. The midmorning skies were clear
and the air was warm. The weather forecast for the next thirty-six hours called for little change.

Retired Rear Admiral Randolf Hennings stood on the 0-7 deck of the carrier’s superstructure. Hennings’s blue civilian suit
stood out among the officers and men dressed in tropical tans. The orange
ALL-ACCESS
pass pinned to his collar made him more, not less, self-conscious.

From the seven-story-high balcony behind the bridge, Hennings had an unrestricted view of the
Nimitz
’s flight deck. Yet his eyes wandered from the operational activities toward the men who stood their stations a dozen feet
away inside the glass-enclosed ship’s bridge.

Captain Diehl sat in his leather swivel chair, overseeing the morning’s operation. He was, at that moment, in conversation
with Lieutenant Thompson, the Officer of the Deck, and with another lieutenant, whom Hennings had not met. The helmsman stood
attentively at the
Nimitz
’s steering controls.