Crashers (38 page)

Tommy scrambled for a purchase, anything solid would do. But as his hands reached for a seat back, the plane's lurching increased. He went skidding backward down the aisle.

.   .   .

“Dammit!” Isaiah Grey shouted at the yoke as it shivered badly in his hands. The Vermeer careened crazily, the nose too low, the fuselage vibrating like a tuning fork. He could feel the wings “slipping”—the port wing falling back, the starboard wing moving faster than the fuselage.

“What do we got!” he bellowed over the roar.

“I don't know!” The copilot, Burke, sounded panicky. “Telltales are green! Monitors green! We—”

The stick shaker rattled, warning of a stall.

Isaiah glanced out at the lights of downtown Valence, a retail region maybe two blocks by two blocks with nothing but fast food, motels and gas stations. A commerce zone aimed entirely at the drivers of Interstate 5. He didn't like seeing the lights so well, so close. His hand reached for the lever that would dump his fuel. But something made him stop. It was a thought—too low, too primal to be called a plan. More like a gut reaction, his hominid fight-or-flight instincts grafted to a lifetime's experience in cockpits; especially in fighters.

Isaiah reached to cut off engine number three before he realized he'd done it.

“Three off!” he shouted.

“There's nothing wrong w—” Burke started to protest. But the buffeting stopped. The yoke no longer vibrated.

Isaiah wiped sweat off his brow. Outside the cockpit window, the city of Valence was perilously close. He was only ten or twelve stories off the ground—and the cockpit stood three stories high with wheels on tarmac.

With one of the two starboard engines out of the show, the Vermeer began angling to the right. The tip of the left wing scythed through the afternoon sky, barely clipping a tall Burger World sign on a long pole. It exploded, electricity from the lighted sign rippling off its surface.

Isaiah tried to correct. Dropping power to the dead engine's counterpart—interior engine, portside wing—would have balanced the thrust. But at this altitude and speed, the Vermeer would stall out and drop like the hammer of a gun.

Instead, he boosted power to the right-hand outboard engine, redlining the Patterson-Pate turbine. A warning whistle sounded as he pushed the engine beyond its maximum stress load.

With one engine on the right putting out almost as much thrust as two
engines on the left, the flight straightened out. The right wing missed a Taco Magnifico sign by seven inches.

That was the good news. The bad news: they were flying directly away from the only runway Isaiah knew in the region.

He vectored toward Interstate 5 and away from the residential and commercial developments of Valence. He could see details on the tops of farm trucks on rural roads beneath him. He needed some altitude. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted the close-clustered, dark purple clouds roiling over Portland, not thirty miles north of his position, and gave thanks that he was only clipping the edge of the storm. He crossed the highway at a thirty-degree angle, heading for the Willamette River with its twin corridors of tall evergreens along both shores. Beyond the river lay—what? Isaiah didn't know the region. Something flat, he prayed.

Either that, or get this beast to stay in the air long enough to get back to Valence.

 

The boards perched on the tops of seats had been an ideal place to put the black box and monitors, as long as the flight remained relatively smooth. When the Vermeer began to buck like a rodeo bull, the wood went flying, equipment smashing into the fuselage or the floor.

Kiki got to her feet first, as soon as the violent shaking stopped. “Tommy!” she shouted, and edged back toward his prone form. The jet was swinging in weird patterns; in a car, she would have recognized the motion as fishtailing. A flash of lightning flickered outside the left-hand windows, and bits of metal and plastic pinged off the fuselage. Kiki winced and stumbled, banging her knee against a seat. She pitched forward as Tommy sat up. She landed atop him, nose to nose.

“Are you all right?” he asked, surprise and worry in his voice.

“Am I?” Kiki rose to her hands and knees above him. She touched his forehead, her fingers coming away slick with blood.

Tommy sat up and touched his skull. Bleeding, all right, but it wasn't hurting much. “It's okay,” he said, rising. “Superficial.”

Ray Calabrese's face came into view over Kiki's shoulder. “You two all right?”

They scrambled to their feet. Tommy said, “The fuck's going on?”

Ray glanced out the windows to the right and saw a fast food sign slide by, almost close enough to touch. “I think we're screwed.”

Tommy sidled past him, toward the flight deck. “John, did you get a reading on—”

Tommy stood for a moment, blinking as a trickle of blood reached his right eye. He wiped at it with the back of his hand.

Kiki moved forward. “Tom—”

She stopped, seeing the limp, dead body of John Roby, his neck snapped, his eyes glassy and unfocused.

Just as Kiki started to cry, the crazy buffeting started again.

 

The Vermeer was losing altitude. Normally, it could run on three engines just fine, but the buffeting that followed the crisis had chewed up way too much forward thrust. They had been within seconds of a stall-out.

The jet screamed over a high, dense cluster of trees and was suddenly above the Willamette River, choppy and gunmetal gray in the overcast weather. The buffeting increased.

Isaiah Grey shouted, “Calabrese! Get up here!”

“Dammit!” the copilot screamed. “The board's green! What the hell's happening!”

The door to the flight deck banged open and Ray Calabrese stumbled in, his face pasty and slick with sweat. He'd climbed over the body of John Roby to get there.

Isaiah cut the power to engine number two—the inboard engine on the port wing. It was a wild-assed guess but it proved to be right. The bucking stopped.

And the Vermeer sank lower.

Isaiah pointed to the Gamelan monitor and the twisting vine of cables leading to first class. “Calabrese! The wires! Shoot 'em!”

Ray knelt, pulled his Glock 9 from his belt holster, and aimed at the bundle of wires. He fired from an inch away. The noise was deafening in the enclosed space. The wires shredded.

Ray said, “Will that help?”

Isaiah shrugged, his fists squeezed around the sluggish yoke. “Damned if I know.”

The stick shaker sounded. Isaiah goosed the two remaining engines, avoiding the stall yet again. He glanced out at the dark gray river and the tree-covered hills beyond and said, “No good.”

He turned the jet back, a nice, soft roll to port, sacrificing speed and precious altitude. The copilot said, “Oh, Jesus . . .”

Ray said, “We got a plan?” He couldn't be positive—Isaiah's face was cheated three-quarters away from him—but he could swear the pilot was grinning.

“Wouldn't call it anything as fancy as a
plan
.” Isaiah spat the words through gritted teeth.

DENNIS SILVERMAN'S OUTBACK HYDROPLANED onto I-5 south to a symphony of horns. He missed a Subaru by inches. His windshield wipers slapped madly at the rain and he leaned forward, his face just inches from the steering wheel.

A produce truck pulled into the middle lane and Dennis skittered between it and a Ford F-110, drawing a blaring horn from the truck, as he juked the Outback into the fast lane and hit the gas.

He prayed that the company's Gulfstream was ready for him in Salem and that the weather wasn't too bad for a takeoff.

The Vermeer swap-out hung in the air reluctantly, maintaining all the aerodynamics of a refrigerator. The stick shaker rattled twice, and twice Isaiah Grey cajoled the wounded bird into staying aloft.

Burke, the copilot, moaned. “Where are we going?”

Isaiah said, “Gonna find us a runway.” The tendons in his neck stood rigid and extended, but his voice was casual, calm.

Standing behind their seats Ray watched the pilot carefully, looking for signs of tension. Mostly, Isaiah looked energized.

Isaiah forced a quick smile over his shoulder. “Ask,” he said, “and ye shall receive.”

Ray peered out the rain-spattered window. “That's . . . a runway? Jesus, that's the highway!”

Isaiah said, “Six of one,” and hauled with all his strength, forcing the jet toward the six-lane ribbon of asphalt.

 

Conchata Menchu was singing along to the soundtrack of
West Side Story,
belting out the Sondheim lyrics at full volume. She couldn't carry a tune worth a lick, but singing by yourself in the cab of a long-haul truck had its advantages.

Conchata was so caught up in the refrain from “I Feel Pretty” that it took her a moment to realize that the great gray blob in the air, dead ahead, wasn't an extremely dense cloud formation. Conchata's voice faded away, leaving Marni Nixon to handle the tune alone.

The gray blob grew larger, took on a shape. It was a plane. No, a jet plane. No, a really, really big jet plane.

And a really, really low one.

“Holy Mary,” Conchata whispered. She hit her powerful air horn, prayed the other drivers around her had seen what she had, and began yanking on the massive steering wheel with all her might.

 

Tommy and Kiki looked out through side-by-side windows in first class, then looked at each other, then out the windows again.

Tommy said, “Well, shit.”

 

“This is the oncoming lane!” Burke bleated from the copilot's seat.

Ray rested a hand on his shoulder. “We don't want to be sneaking up on those drivers. Better they should see us.”

The plane was still bucking badly and Ray braced himself against the copilot's seat.

Isaiah shook his head. “Overpass.”

“Yeah.” Ray sighed. “I see the bitch.”

About two miles ahead, a rural road crossed over the highway, just barely visible in the gloom.

Burke said, “Our father, who art in heaven . . .”

Ray said, “That's not funny.”

Isaiah said, “He's not joking.”

 

Dennis Silverman switched lanes and his wheels spun without traction for a split second before catching. The Outback lurched forward.

Peering through the arc of the windshield wipers, he activated the Bluetooth hands-free controls on his steering wheel. He'd preprogrammed in the number.

“Scarlotti Aviation.”

“This is Dennis Silverman! I'm with Gamelan Industries! Our Gulf-stream Three is scheduled for a flight to California! Is it ready?”

“Sir, I gotta tell you, we've got a nasty storm front moving south. We've got considerable wind shear and lightning cells all over the place. They just shut down Portland International and McNary Field could be next. Are you sure y—”

“Yes!” Dennis bellowed, blinking as sweat dripped into his eyes. The
Battlestar Galactica
model dangling from his rearview mirror danced as he swerved around a sky-blue Caddy. “I have to fly out today! I'll be at the airport in twenty minutes. Have the engines running. We'll take off the second I'm on board!”

He disconnected. Around him, cars started honking.
Fuck you all,
he thought, speeding up.

The cars across the median from him, heading north, started honking, too.

 

The Vermeer 111 was hobbling along on two engines and the stall-warning stick shaker sounded yet again. Isaiah hauled back on the yoke, scrambling for every inch of elevation he could get. The rural road overpass slipped beneath them, clearing the belly by three feet.

“Landing gears down.”

“Please, God, oh please . . .” Burke chanted. He didn't touch the landing-gear controls.

Isaiah casually stretched far to his right, hit the controls.

The great plane began dropping again. “Seat belts!” he shouted.

Ray folded down the extra seat behind the pilot's and reached for the wall-mounted shoulder straps.

 

In first class, Tommy and Kiki scrambled for the nearest seats and strapped themselves in.

 

A long-haul rig zoomed down I-5, carrying three tiers of the new line of Lexus LS 460Ls, one atop the other on their tracks. The driver was searching through his books-on-tape collection. He glanced up as the Vermeer screamed over his cab.

The driver panicked. He wrenched the wheel as hard as he could to one side, even though the jetliner had already passed. The truck glided into a right angle relative to the trailer, blue smoke erupting from the wheels as momentum dragged it sideways down the highway. The trailer crabbed over onto its side, covering all three lanes, and the right-hand wheels left the ground. It teetered for a moment, then bucked over. The sedans were wrenched from their tie-downs, rolling over and over across the highway like monstrous dice. Three of them bounded through the air and barrel-rolled across the median, landing in the southbound lanes.

Oncoming northbound cars screeched and swerved to avoid them and hit one another instead. One minute they had been seven individual cars driving for seven individual destinations; the next they were a kinetic sculpture of rent bumpers, hoods accordioned in and steam hissing from engines.

In the southbound lane, a school bus carrying the girls' basketball team from Sprague High School belched blue smoke from its tires as the driver stomped on the brake and brought the mammoth yellow vehicle to a full stop. Girls screamed. The nose of the bus barely kissed the chassis of an on-its-side Lexus, moving at less than a mile an hour, making the sedan rotate slowly on its doors like a clock hand.

 

A mile south of that accident, Dennis Silverman glanced over and realized that every single northbound car had pulled off the road, onto either the median or the shoulder.
There must be one hell of a fender bender back there,
he thought. Which was when he saw that some of the cars heading in his direction were veering to the shoulder of the road, too.