Blue Skies (36 page)

“Are we full?” Sam asked.

“An ass in every seat and a face in every window. Like you had to ask.”

“Do we have a final head count?”

“Any second now, along with a weight and balance, and then we push. Darn close to on time. Have a nice flight,” she added, ducking back out.

Brenda was in the forward galley to finish counting her stock. Stephanie and Georgia were in the aft galley, so Karen went to the door, waiting to see if there were any nonrevving crew members or jump-seaters coming on at the last minute. Failing that, she would secure the door.

She smiled when the young man came sprinting down the jetway, happy to see an airline employee hurrying when they were in danger of running late. He must be an airline employee in that white shirt and dark pants, though he had no logo on his shirt. Before she could ponder this, he stuck the muzzle of a very large gun into her waist.

“Close and secure the door,” he said, though not unpleasantly.

“Wha—”

“I said, close and secure the door,” he ground out nervously.

Karen had a lot of flying experience, having been furloughed from two other airlines before being hired by NCA, and she had been flying at the time of the 9/11 attacks. She did not want to let him on the airplane. “Okay, look, let's just back out of here and—”

He jabbed her harder. “I want you to close and secure the door.” Sweat beaded his forehead and upper lip.

She stood in that little area between first class and coach, her toes right at the edge of the doorway, with bulkheads on either side of her. No one but Karen knew this was happening. She didn't want him to take her airplane and she was willing to make a huge sacrifice to avoid that. The problem was, would her sacrifice prevent others?

“No, I can't,” she said, and began to walk toward him, pushing him backward. “You have to leave the jetway.”

He lifted the point of the weapon out of her belly and whacked her across the face, knocking her off her feet and to the floor of the jetway. Then he walked right on the airplane and headed down the first-class aisle toward the cockpit.

Karen struggled to her feet, holding the side of her head. She leaned against the jetway wall and heard only the normal rustling of a plane filled with passengers. Then there was the click of the cockpit door closing after the gunman, and someone in first class cried, “Gun. He had a gun!”

It began slowly. A woman in first class got out of her
seat and fled the plane, padding down the jetway. Her husband followed right behind. In seconds, all the passengers in first class were rapidly but quietly deplaning while the passengers in coach looked on in confusion. And then they began to follow, having no earthly idea why.

Karen pushed her way back into the plane. She struggled to get to the far side, opposite the door. From there, her cheek smarting painfully, she jumped up and down, waving her arms over the heads of fleeing passengers, trying to get the attention of Stephanie and Georgia. Way at the back of the plane she saw the two startled faces of her sister flight attendants, and with hand gestures signaled a gun and pointed to the cockpit.

As one hundred and fifty people fled off the plane, not sure why, Stephanie and Georgia looked at Karen in confusion.

“Gun,” Georgia said. “She's saying there's a gun.”

Immediately she headed for the tail door to blow the slide. “Wait!” Stephanie said. “Check the ramp!”

They both looked outside and what they saw scared them to death. About six men, dressed entirely in black and wearing helmets, trained lethal-looking guns on the airplane. They stared at one another. “Are they the good guys or the bad guys?” Stephanie asked.

“Okay,” Georgia said decisively. “Blow the slide, disable the airplane so it can't take off, but evacuate out the jetway in case they're bad guys.”

Stephanie threw open the door and the rubber slide began to inflate
—galoob, galoob, galoob—
flipping open in huge arcs. Like a tidal wave with a mind of its own, the coach passengers turned and headed out the back and down the slide. At the bottom, two of the armed men
moved to the end of the slide and began helping people off, pointing out the evacuation route.

Georgia looked at Stephanie and crossed herself. And then began herding people down the slide.

 

Nikki and Sam had heard someone enter and close the door. Because the cockpit door was to remain open until they had taxied out to the runway for takeoff, the unusual sound caused them to turn. That was the first indication either of them had that the plane was being hijacked.

He stood a couple of feet behind them. Although he raised the gun threateningly, he didn't point it at them. “I have to go to Ohio,” he said. “Right now.”

Stunned, neither of them spoke. They were installed in cockpit seats, which were not simple to get in and out of. Facing forward as they were, there was simply no way to defend themselves against a man with a gun. One funny move from either of them and he could shoot them so quickly, they'd never know it happened.

“Oregon! I have to go to Oregon!” he gritted out, agitated and sweating. His teeth began to chatter and he looked as though he might cry.

“Sure thing,” Nikki said slowly, soothingly. “I'm your captain, this is your copilot, and we're going to take you.”

“Right now,” he said more evenly.

“Right now,” she said.

He was not a terrorist. He didn't even know where he wanted to go. She flipped a couple of switches with her left hand and slid her right hand down to the console to press the open mike button. “There are just a couple of things to do before starting the engines. Can you, um,
sit on that chair? Just pull it down from the side of the wall and have a seat.”

“Are you taking me?”

“Absolutely,” she said. She glanced over at Sam and saw that his eyes were locked on the young man and he seemed frozen—not with fear, but rather anger. Small wonder, after what he'd been through in the tragic loss of his wife. She hoped he wasn't in shock. “I'm Captain Burgess. This is Captain Landon, flying as my copilot today. And what is your name?”

He bit his lip and again appeared as though he might cry. He glanced left, right, then back at Nikki. “Michael. My name is Michael. Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael.”

“Go ahead and pull that jump seat down and get comfortable, Michael.”

She turned back to the front and fiddled meaninglessly with switches and dials, as though getting ready to start the plane. Sam also shifted around in his seat, staring out the front of the plane, his hands on his lap, clenching and unclenching his fists. Nikki had an insane and hysterical thought—Michael, Michael, Bo-bichael, banana-fanna-fo-fichael…She compressed the mike button again. “And do you have friends or family in Oregon?”

“I have to go,” he said.

“Certainly,” she said calmly. Even she was impressed by how calm she was. She had heard the cockpit voice recordings of pilots on their way to auguring in:
Tell Mary Lou and little Jack I love them very much…. We're going down….
Her dirty little secret was that if it ever got that bad, that close, she'd just yell,
Holy shit! Waaaaaahhh!
And she'd yell it like a girl.

But with a gun behind her and Sam unreadable beside
her, would she cave in to fear? Not unless she were suicidal.

Outside the plane, on the ground, in the terminal windows and on the roof, black-clad men began appearing, pointing guns at the plane.

“Get them away! Get them away!” Michael yelled, standing up again. There were metal runners on the floor for sliding the cockpit seats back and forth and she didn't want him to trip and accidentally discharge the gun. Whenever he got excited, he waved that gun around and did not appear to be too graceful on his feet.

“Take it easy, Michael,” she said. “I'll tell them to go away. I'm going to call Dispatch on my cell phone and tell the dispatcher to get rid of them. Okay?” She reached into her brain bag beside her cockpit seat and pulled out the cell. She clicked off a few numbers. “Yeah, Dave. Captain Burgess here, Flight 909 to Oregon. The men in black are making our passenger upset. Ask them to leave, please? Thank you.” She put the phone down on the console and left it on, hoping they could hear her in Dispatch.

She looked over her shoulder at Michael and gave him a smile. She called up the kind of smile she had used for April when she didn't make cheerleading, for Jared when his soccer team lost in the finals, a really good mother-smile. But she knew that he was unstable, very likely psychotic, and any moment might be their last for no reason at all. “There,” she said. “Better?”

He just looked around nervously, chewing his lip, now and then letting out a whimper.

Sam was still staring straight ahead, the muscles in his cheeks pulsing, his eyes mere slits. What must this be like for him? He must be sitting there wondering if
it had been anything like this for his wife. She found herself sending him a mental message.
Hang on, Sam, just hang on.

 

Joe Riordan was called immediately. At four-thirty the afternoon before Thanksgiving, the corporate offices were beginning to thin out. He called Bob Riddle's office and was immediately transferred to voice mail, so he slammed down the phone and stormed out of his office. He pitched his car keys to Jewel. “Bring the car up to the door. I'll be out in a second.”

She caught the keys and grabbed her purse. This was a command she'd never been given before, and she wasn't going to be asking questions.

Joe was on the other side of the building in no time. He passed Dixie's desk on his way to Riddle's office. “We have a gunman on 909. Jewel's got the car in front.” And he kept going.

Dixie could tell by his panicked stride that he wasn't going to wait for her to think about this. She grabbed her purse, her blazer, her ID badge and fled. It was probably the first time she didn't bother to freshen her lips or wash out her cup.

Crue was just returning to her desk from the ladies' room when Joe came bearing down on her. “Where's Riddle? He at the airport?”

“No, he's…ah…”

“He still in town? On his cell?”

“He said something about meeting some of the pilots and then…”

She looked at her watch. He had told her he was going to meet some of his boys for a drink, and then he was going to try to get a hop to Phoenix for the holiday. She was to call him one more time today from the office at exactly four-thirty, and then she could go on home. Her
instructions were the same as many times before. She should call from the phone at her desk, he would recognize the number as his own office, and he would take it from there. She was to hang up, but many times she had covertly listened to his scam.

Joe Riordan picked up the receiver from the phone on Crue's desk. “Punch him up for me?”

The large console and keypad faced her. She popped off the seven numbers rapidly. There on her desk, looking back up at her, was her résumé—she was planning to leave it with Shanna in HR before going home. She had already applied for the position of crew scheduler and this would complete her application.

Joe's attention was on his call; he could barely make out Riddle's voice above the bar noise and ching-ching-ching of slot or poker machines. “Riddle,” Bob answered. Before Joe could even say hello, Riddle was nearly shouting, “What? She did
what?
She can't make decisions about pilot pay! Jesus Christ, she's just trying to create some political coup because she thinks I'm already on my way out of town for the holiday, but I'll fix her little wagon. I'll see Riordan on Thanksgiving Day if I have to, because we're not going to screw our pilots out of their rightful—”

“Riddle!”
Joe shouted, cutting him off. “Get back to your office ASAP! And don't leave until you see me, no matter how late it is!” He slammed the phone onto its base. “We have a hijacking,” he told Crue. And with that he left the building.

 

By five o'clock, Nikki was exhausted, but Michael wasn't. He was clearly in some manic state. She had told Michael about a dozen times that they'd be under way as soon as they could get some clearance, but he
was growing impatient. Sam, on the other hand, had needed some time to get his head together and come out of shock, but he was back. Cool and in the moment.

“Growing up, I had a dog, a cat and a duck,” Sam said. “What about you, Michael? You have pets?”

Nikki shot him a confused look, but he just winked at her.

“Two dogs,” Michael said. “Bowser and Glory. They're dead.”

“Yeah? Mine, too—but dogs don't live as long as people. What kind?”

And for about ten minutes the men bonded over childhood pets. Apparently this young man had had a pretty decent childhood, a mom, dad, brothers, sisters, and now he was clearly suffering from some mental illness that held him as much a victim as Nikki and Sam. Nikki found herself hoping no one would hurt him—but then she'd think about April and Jared and begin praying that this kid wouldn't kill her.