Skyhammer (21 page)

One of them went directly into the lounge area and dropped a coin in the coffee machine. But the other came over to the desk.

“Some weather you got here.”

Dobbins nodded without looking up. “November in Wichita.”

“So—you heard anything about that New World flight?”

Dobbins did look up now, and adjusted his glasses. The pilot was excited, he could tell. “Son, I got no idea what you’re talking
about,” he said.

The pilot leaned over the counter. “You haven’t heard anything? Nothing about a copilot taking over a plane and threatening
to crash it with everyone aboard?”

“What?” Dobbins pushed up his glasses again. “Where’d you hear that?”

“On the radio. We were tracking about forty miles behind him when he called up K.C. Said the captain was incapacitated and
he was in command. We didn’t believe it either. But that’s what we heard. I figured it’d be on the news by now.”

“I ain’t been listening to the TV” Dobbins rose from his chair and moved over to the counter. “Which airline you say it was?”

“New World, Five-fifty-five.”

The Hawker captain, coffee in hand, approached the desk now.

“Is this for real?” Dobbins asked him.

“Far as we know.” The older man nodded. “The guy’s headed for Phoenix. Out to get Jack Farraday—that’s what he said. We were
on the same frequency but then they switched him off to a discrete.”

“Well, holy cow,” Dobbins said, staring at the captain and then his copilot. “Let’s see what’s on the tube.”

He lifted the counter access and led the way over to the TV in the lounge. It was on but there was no sound. Dobbins turned
up the volume. Then he flipped through the channels,slowly, but there were only pre-game shows and Kung Fu movies. “Damn it,”
he said, “I been trying to get them to put in cable so we could get CNN.”

The three men stood watching the screen for another minute. Then Dobbins turned back toward the counter.

“Tell you what,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ve got a nephew in the newsroom at Channel Seven. I’ll give him a jingle.”

It took less than five minutes for the news from Darryl Dobbins’s nephew to reach the top of his station’s affiliate network.
Within another twenty minutes, VHF aviation-band scanners were being trained on the sky along 555’s route, as well as toward
the antennas of air route traffic control centers near all large cities. Switchboards at FAA Headquarters, the FBI, and New
World Airlines began to light up with calls.

Flight Deck

New World 555

19:01 GMT/14:01 EST

Pate finished another cigarette. The ashtray was overflowing now. He took another sip from his water bottle and then leaned
to his right to look down through the side window. The land below was the color of rawhide, webbed by the darker threads of
water courses. He would cross into New Mexico soon and be truly in the West again. He’d fly over Albuquerque in about twenty
minutes, and he knew that if he searched he would probably even be able to pick out the subdivision where he and Katherine
had started the house they had dreamed about and never gotten a chance to live in. Would he be able to pick out the neighborhood
where Katherine and the girls were living now? Probably not. Shouldn’t even try, he decided. It would only make him think
about her, which he shouldn’t let himself do. Better to believe that he hadn’t ever met Katherine. Had never looked up and
seen her standing on the other side of the open grave at Louise Yellow Wolf’s funeral.

The day did seem too long ago. Like something he’d only heard of or imagined. Except that he remembered the August heat burning
through the thin shade of the sycamores, the pale hills in the distance. The white cabbage butterflies dancing frantically
through the patches of sun beyond the shade of the cemetery. The silence, the buzzing of insects. The two Indian boys sitting
on the old Ford tractor, away from the crowd, waiting to fill in the grave. And Katherine in her gray suit, blonde hair tied
up. The daughter of the high school’s principal, all grown up. He hadn’t been back to Lapwai in ten years, wouldn’t have gone
back for any other reason but the funeral.

He and Katherine had shaken hands. “Would you like some coffee?” she had asked. Pate had been thinking of scotch, but he followed
her back to her house. Her parents’ old house, where she was living after her divorce. They sat at the table in the yellow-walled
kitchen, and she told him about her marriage, the end of it, about her two daughters. Smiling at her hands, at him, shyly
but knowingly. And then he had told her all about his life. And she had said to him, “You sound like everything’s all your
fault.”

It was exactly how he had felt. That all the years between his leaving Lapwai and his return were a mistake he had perpetrated.
Years of living like there was no tomorrow, living just like his old man. He had known only girls he’d had nothing to say
to—nothing of consequence—and all they had ever talked about was what they’d done on their last layover or something they’d
bought. He had committed a cheap life, he felt, chasing anything in a skirt, counting coup in the cockpit afterward. And he
had told Katherine all of this, that day of the funeral. He had poured out his story like a confession. And what had she said?
That maybe it was a good day to start over—looking at him with those calm green eyes of hers, knowing him for what he was
but also for what he could be. He had gone back to Denver, back to Westar for two weeks before he’d realized he couldn’t do
it without her.

But she would be a lot better off without him, Pate thought now. He had messed up her life enough. It was a good day for her
to start over. Would she forgive him, though? He couldn’t help but wonder that now. As much as she might try, could she?

Without warning his mind betrayed him, showing him a passenger cabin, an audience of faces, the view of them he’d seen so
many times. Though after a thousand times, you didn’t see them anymore—they weren’t people, only a photograph you’d seen too
many times, only more freight, filling the “tube.” And once you were in the cockpit, you forgot about them altogether; the
cockpit became the “magic box,” a head without body or wings, flying by itself. After ten thousand times, you found it easy
to feel alone.

Except he saw them clearly, in the brief instant before he shut the image out—rows of individual faces, and Mariella’s cheerful
smile, dissolving in a sheet of flame. Could Katherine forgive that?

Didn’t matter.
Didn’t matter
! he thought furiously now. Not if she hated him for the rest of her life. Better in fact if she did. And he would not care
about her any more either. The negotiator had actually done him a favor, asking about her. The last of his need for her had
been squeezed out, and now he’d be okay. They couldn’t use her to get to him. He wouldn’t think about her at all. He’d think
about Jack Farraday. He’d get him on the line and let him talk—keep him talking, keep them all guessing until it was too late.

Pate shifted in his seat and shook his head to clear it. He checked the instruments. Yes, he’d screwed up, he knew it. If
they hadn’t been looking for Katherine before, they would be now. And they’d get her to talk to him if they could. But he
wouldn’t talk to her. He’d twist the dial again. He wouldn’t talk to L’Hommedieu anymore either. He would only talk to Farraday.
He would lay it all on Jack Farraday, the one who deserved the blame.

It was 14:04 now. The headwind was slowing him down. Almost two hours remained. Plenty for him, not enough for them. Enough
time for the newshounds to get on the scent? Somebody somewhere had heard his first contact. More than one flight would’ve
been on the same channel. They’d be scanning the airways by now, picking up his signal.

He dialed frequency 113.8 into his number-two VOR receiver, then 250 degrees into the course window of the horizontal situation
indicator. The deviation needle centered up nicely. He reselected VOR/LOC on the autopilot control panel so that the autopilot
would track the course, applying wind- drift correction. The DME readout indicated fifty-six nautical miles to the Wichita
VOR. He flipped the transfer switch on his VHF control head back to Kansas City’s frequency and listened until he heard a
TWA jet check in, followed by the controller’s acknowledgment. Then he keyed his microphone.

“Kansas City, New World Five-fifty-five,” he transmitted.

Aviation Command Center

19:12 GMT/14:12 EST

Searing swiveled his chair around, his face grim. Something had changed for the worse.

“What is it?” L’Hommedieu asked. He had just returned from the men’s room.

“Slusser just called. He got a message from Pate.”

L’Hommedieu felt his heart sink. “He won’t talk to Farra-day?”

“No. He wants to talk to Farraday.” Searing scowled, studying L’Hommedieu carefully. “But he says he won’t talk to you no
more.”

L’Hommedieu sat down. It was not this news that startled him so much as his own failure to foresee such a possibility. Such
a simple move. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it, and he swore at himself under his breath.

“In fact,” Searing said, a trace of sarcasm creeping into his accent this time, “Pate says he won’t be talking to
no
one again till he flies into the Albuquerque control sector.”

“Did Slusser give you his exact words?”

“Said, ‘tell L’Hommedieu I don’t need to talk to him anymore and that I’m taking him up on Farraday.’”

“That’s it?”

Searing nodded, folded his arms.

L’Hommedieu shook his head slowly, pounded his fist softly against the table, trying to think. “Well it complicates things.”

“Whistle Dixie for me,” Searing said. He unfolded his arms, slapped his knees and got up. “I’m making that call to the Pentagon.
And the White House. It’s time.” He stood looking down at L’Hommedieu, waiting to be challenged. But L’Hommedieu only shook
his head again. He had no argument to make. It had been a mistake to alienate Pate. A gamble that hadn’t paid off, had instead
cost him.

“Then I’m calling New World again,” Searing said. “Kick some butt. Tell them their boss is our last hope.” He pulled a tissue
and blew his nose, then picked up the phone.

L’Hommedieu leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Now how was he supposed to do his job? It was tough enough when
you were face to face with the subject, tougher over the phone. Now he’d have to work through a middle man, someone he didn’t
even know. Listening in but unable to respond.

Although this might work to his advantage, he realized. It reminded him of something a Navy friend had once told him. A veteran
of the nuclear submarine service, who had mentioned the fact that they never used their active sonar while they were on patrol.
All that sophisticated detection gear and yet they disconnected it as soon as they were at sea. “Why?” L’Hommedieu had asked,
dumbfounded. “Imagine you’re in this big, pitch-dark room,” his friend had said. “Like a high school gymnasium—you and this
other guy. And you each have a shotgun and a flashlight. And you’re trying to shoot him, and he’s trying to shoot you. Would
you turn on your flashlight to try to find him?”

It would be like that with Pate. So long as L’Hommedieu didn’t turn on his light—didn’t break in and try to talk to Pate—Pate
wouldn’t know he was listening in, advising whomever Pate would talk to. They could work on Pate passively, flashlight off,
through Farraday, and through Katherine Winslow. And maybe a friend or fellow pilot? There might still be time to find an
old Westar man, one in Albuquerque, where Searing had said many still lived.

And suddenly L’Hommedieu knew who. Again, he was amazed he hadn’t realized sooner. Did he still have the business card, though?
His wallet was a pack rat’s nest of paper scraps, old receipts, cards—but then he found it, a white one with the Federal Aviation
Agency logo embossed on it, and underneath that the name of his old West Point platoon leader, James Edwin Kelly, Flight Examiner.
He and Kelly hadn’t kept up a close friendship over the years—Christmas greetings were exchanged—but at least they had kept
track of each other. He knew that after graduation Jim Kelly had finagled his way into the Air Force, and then into pilot
training. And after the Air Force he’d gone to work for a commercial carrier, and if L’Hommedieu’s memory served him correctly,
the airline Kelly had flown with—and resigned from to take the FAA job—was Westar.

He turned the card over. Kelly’s home phone number was penciled in, along with his address. Yes, he’d stayed in Albuquerque.
And with any luck he’d be home today, L’Hommedieu thought. Kelly wouldn’t miss the Army-Navy game if he could help it.

L’Hommedieu pushed his chair down to John Travis and showed him the card. “Call Albuquerque FBI and get a car out to this
address.”

He propelled himself back to his own station and picked up the phone. They would find Kelly. Their luck was going to change
now. They would also locate Katherine Winslow. All the pieces would start falling into place, Jack Farraday, as well. They
would fit together somehow, and bring Emil Pate to his senses. L’Hommedieu didn’t know how, but he knew it had to happen.
There was no other way.

Corrales, New Mexico

19:11 GMT/12:11 MST

For the last three years, James Kelly had bet on Army. Two years ago he had wagered a new pair of basketball shoes against
his son Josh’s garage cleanup. Last year he had bet three lawnmowings against repainting the backyard fence. Since he’d lost
the bet last year, this year’s bet was the same. This year, however, unlike the last two, Kelly also had points.Six, in fact,
and he considered himself very clever to have negotiated them. With an Irishman’s talent for feigning doubt, he had spent
most of the morning bemoaning Army’s weak offensive line and reminding Josh that the Vegas bookies had Navy favored by thirteen
and a half points.

Unfortunately, six was beginning to look like not enough. Navy had scored two touchdowns, to Army’s single field goal. Army
had the ball, but on second down had just blown another pass play. With halftime only a minute away, Josh was already beginning
to gloat.