Mayday (13 page)

J
ack Miller sat at his long, functionally modern desk in the center of the starkly lit, windowless room. He glanced at the
wall clock—11:37—then looked over at his assistant, Dennis Evans, who sat at a smaller desk, flipping desultorily through
some papers. “I’m breaking for lunch in five minutes, Dennis.”

Evans glanced up from his desk. “Okay.”

The Trans-United Airlines dispatching office at San Francisco International Airport was experiencing its usual midday lull.
The morning departures were well into their routines, and it was too early to begin the flight plans for the late-afternoon
trips. The half-dozen dispatchers read newspapers, their assistants made an attempt to look occupied, and the junior aides
tried to appear busy and eager.

Miller yawned and stretched. After twenty-eight years at Trans-United, he had enough seniority to get the two things he’d
always wanted: a nine-to-five dispatcher’s shift, and assignment to the Pacific desk. Now that he had them both, he was bored.
He almost yearned for the night shift and the more hectic South American desk again. Such was life.

Miller flipped absently through the pages of his
Sports Illustrated
, then laid it aside. He looked at his computer console, at the display of assigned trips. He was, at that moment, responsible
for monitoring only four flights: 243 from Honolulu, 101 from Melbourne, 377 to Tahiti, and 52 to Tokyo.

The weather across the Pacific routes was good, and all the flights had ample reserve fuel. No problems. Not much to do. On
days like this, he found himself watching the clock. Miller’s eye caught an empty entry on his display screen. He regarded
the blank column for a second. “Dennis.” He spoke in a voice that years of practice had trained to penetrate the ambient sounds
of the room without actually rising above the noise. “Dennis, did you forget 52’s update?”

“Hold on.” The young man walked over to a stack of computer messages on a countertop and leafed through them. He went through
them a second time, more slowly. He looked up and called across the room. “Didn’t get one. It’s overdue. Want me to send a
request?”

Miller didn’t like Dennis Evans’s choice of the word “overdue.”
Overdue
connoted something quite different from
late
in airline parlance. Miller looked at the wall clock. The fuel and position report was only a few minutes behind schedule.
Late. It was purely routine. Minor information. Yet Miller would not, under any circumstances, turn anything over to Evans
that wasn’t perfect. Twenty years before, he had left an open item on his sheet and gone to dinner. When he returned, he’d
found the dispatcher’s office full of company executives. One of their new Boeing 707’s had gone down somewhere over the Gulf
of Mexico. That was the night that the euphemism “overdue” became clear.

Miller glanced back at the wall clock, then at the computer screen again. He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t overly concerned.
“Well . . . we’ve got time.” He punched the computer keys to get a different screen, then looked down at the names of the
crew. He was familiar enough with the name Alan Stuart. Like a lot of modern business relationships, this one was totally
electronic. Just a voice on the telephone and the radio. Yet he felt he knew the man, and he knew that Flight 52’s captain
was dependable. Miller wasn’t familiar with the other names on the crew list, but he knew that Stuart ran a tight ship. Miller
was certain that Stuart would soon discover the oversight and send an update. Bugging a pilot, especially a conscientious
one like Stuart, was the quickest way to become a disliked dispatcher, and Jack Miller had no intention of doing anything
like that during the remainder of his career. It was the sort of stunt that Evans was noted for. He looked up at Evans, who
was going through the messages again. “We’ll get the update soon. If we don’t, then . . .” Miller paused and considered. He
didn’t want to request Flight 52’s updates by relaying a message through air-traffic control for everyone to hear. His eyes
fixed on the door to the small glass-enclosed communications room that housed the data-link machine. ”If we don’t hear from
them by, say, twelve o’clock, type out a request to them on the link.”

Evans grunted a reply. The radio was faster and easier than the data-link—sometimes link messages just didn’t get through—but
Miller was always concerned with discretion and politeness. If a captain was sitting on his thumb up there, he ought to be
called on the radio and told about it. Evans pushed the computer messages aside and sat back at his desk.

Miller glanced at the computer screen again, then punched a button to turn off the display. “It’s a nice day out there,” he
called to Evans. “They’re drinking coffee and daydreaming.”

Evans mumbled something as he worked on another flight’s data.

Miller watched the clock. The room became still except for the background noises of the electronics. Miller focused on the
sweep second hand. He was accustomed to this kind of waiting, but it always made him uneasy. Like the times his wife was overdue.
Late. Or his teenaged son or daughter. The clock moved, not slowly, but quickly, at times like this, running through the minutes,
making the awaited party more awaited. Making one wonder all sorts of things.

John Berry sat strapped into the captain’s seat of the Straton. The midday sun poured through the cockpit windows, bathing
him in bright sunlight. He pressed the talk button on the hand microphone again and spoke loudly. “Do you read me? Does anyone
read?” Beads of perspiration dotted his forehead, and his mouth felt dry.

With his right hand, he made careful adjustments on the audio panel. “Mayday. Do you read Mayday? Any station. Do you read
Mayday?” He sat back and listened. Listened for the familiar crackle, the squelch-break that was the electronic equivalent
of a man clearing his throat before he spoke. But there was only the persistent, unbroken hum of the speakers.

Berry slumped into the seat. He was confused. If there was one thing he knew from his years of flying, it was how to work
a radio. It seemed simple enough even in the Straton. The airliner’s radios did not seem much different from all the other
sets that he had operated. Yet there must be something different about them, some small esoteric task that had to be performed
before the radios would transmit. But
what?
And
why?
Why should these radios be different? “Damn it.” Berry wondered how in God’s name he could ever fly the aircraft if he couldn’t
even work the radios.

The urge to talk to someone had become overwhelming. It had gone beyond the simple necessity to report the disaster and ask
for assistance. It had become an overpowering need to hear a human voice just for the sake of hearing it. But as each minute
of silence passed, Berry was losing hope and was becoming alternately frantic and despondent. His hand shook so badly now
that he stopped trying to transmit and sat back and tried to calm himself. He glanced at the instruments. Everything looked
good, but after his failure with the radios, he was beginning to doubt his ability to read even standard gauges. And the majority
of the Straton’s instrumentation was standard enough to be familiar. But the markings—the altitudes, speeds, fuel reserves,
engine temperatures—were incredibly amplified. He tried to imagine he was in the Skymaster and tried to reduce the problems
and the instrument panels to manageable proportions.

He looked at the fuel reserves. Less than half full. What this meant in flying time at the present speed and altitude, he
didn’t know. But he’d figure it out soon enough as the needles drifted leftward and the minutes passed. He stared at the control
wheels as they moved slightly—inward, outward, left, right. The rudder pedals made small movements. The flight was steady.

Something odd caught his eye and he looked down near his left knee. He stared at the open protective cover and read the words
above it.
AUTOPILOT MASTER SWITCH
. He stared at the toggle, which was pointing to on. He understood. The Captain had either lost his nerve or lost consciousness
before he could complete his last mission. Berry nodded. It sort of made sense. But for Berry, there was no such easy way
out. Not yet. He reached down and snapped back the protective cover.

He found he was building up a healthy anger toward fate and toward death, if for no other reason than to tell his wife what
he really thought about her. Unfinished business. He reached down and grabbed the microphone. “Mayday! Mayday, you sons-of-bitches!
Answer Mayday!”

He began changing the frequency he was using, alternating between the frequencies left on the radios. When he transmitted,
he knew he should keep to the universally understood words. He could save the explanations for when he made contact. “Mayday!
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” He waited for a reply, but again there was none.

Out of desperation he began to randomly turn the dials and transmit on every channel and on each of the four radios in the
cockpit. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”

He switched back to the original frequency. “This is Trans-United Flight . . .” What was the flight number? What difference
did it make? He tried to remember his boarding pass but couldn’t. “This is the Tokyo-bound Trans-United Airlines Straton 797.
Mayday. Do you read Mayday? Trans-United operations, this is the Tokyo-bound Straton 797, we have an emergency. Do you read?”
He waited. Nothing.

He could see that the radio’s transmission lights blinked whenever he pressed the microphone button. He could tell from the
sidetone in the cockpit speakers that the radios were operating. But for some reason they were not putting out. He suspected
that something—the antenna perhaps—had been damaged. He had hoped that someone in the cockpit had been able to put out a distress
signal, but he was fairly certain now that they hadn’t. The fault in transmitting was not his—he’d known that, really. The
radios were all set by the pilots to transmit. They simply weren’t sending. That’s all there was to it. No distress call had
been sent and none ever would be sent.

No radios equaled no chance of flying the plane home. He almost felt a measure of relief. The responsibility of flying and
landing this huge machine was not a prospect he’d looked forward to. But he
did
want to live. He put the microphone down and stared at the clear skies around him. His problems on the ground were in their
proper perspective now. He could and would change a lot of things if he ever got back to New York. But everyone facing death
must make that observation. One more chance. But more often than not, nothing changed if you were lucky enough to get a second
chance. Still, he didn’t want to
lie down
and die. That’s what he’d been doing for the last ten years. He had to think it all out. Later.

John Berry turned and looked back through the open cockpit door into the lounge. He could see Linda Farley sitting in a club
chair, weeping quietly.

Berry slid out of the captain’s seat and walked back into the lounge. The Captain and the copilot lay near the piano where
he and the girl had dragged them, covered with blankets. The body of the flight engineer lay against the far bulkhead, his
face and torso covered with a lap blanket.

Berry watched the flight attendant whose name tag said Terri. She was sitting on a small sofa, speaking incoherently to herself.
Her face was smeared with blood and saliva. She seemed calm, but he’d have to watch her carefully for signs of violence. He’d
have to keep her away from the cockpit, where she could do real harm.

Berry noticed that the old lady had stopped babbling to her dead husband and was now crouched behind a club chair peering
over the top and making odd clucking sounds. Blood and drool covered her face also. Her husband’s body was still slumped over
the cocktail table, but it seemed to have shifted. Berry wondered if rigor mortis was setting in already.

The five passengers on the horseshoe-shaped couch were still unconscious. One, a pretty young woman, was making odd sounds
that came from her throat, and Berry wondered if that was what was called the death rattle.

The lounge smelled of feces, urine, and vomit. Berry closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against his temples. His head
still ached from the oxygen loss, and he was becoming queasy.

He opened his eyes and surveyed the scene again. He’d thought that the confusion of these people might improve, might be reversible.
But he was fairly certain now that it wasn’t. His world was divided neatly and irrevocably, with no fuzzy lines, between Us
and Them. And there were a lot more of Them.

Berry walked over to the girl and put his hand on her shoulder. His daughter had been this girl’s age when her remoteness
and alienation had begun. But that was on the earth. Here, an adult enjoyed all the old prerogatives. “You’re going to have
to calm down and start helping me.”

Linda Farley wiped her eyes and nodded.

Berry walked to the bar and found a can of Coca-Cola and opened it. He rummaged through the debris under the bar and extracted
a miniature bottle of liquor. Johnny Walker Red. He opened it and drained off the ounce and a half, then carried the cola
to the girl. “Here.”