Mayday (6 page)

The sound of his own breathing filled his helmet and perspiration collected under his pressure suit. His right hand gripped
tightly around the control stick. His left arm tensed against the side console, his fingers touching the throttles. He had
stopped trying to make any additional adjustments on the radar. The picture that it painted was accurate.

He felt his nerves becoming steadier as he resigned himself to all the worst possible scenarios. He stared distractedly at
the radar screen, then, for the first time since he had fired, he looked out of the Plexiglas bubble at the world he flew
in.
Es tu culpa, Pedro. It is your fault, Peter.
He pushed his finger against the thin Plexiglas. Half an inch away was an airless, subzero void.

A glint of hope shook him out of his lassitude. There was one straw he hadn’t grasped at yet. He looked back at his console.
Working quickly with the radar controls, he slewed a computer readout to the target on his screen. In a few seconds another
entry displayed on his information board. The target was cruising at 62,000 feet. It was making a ground speed of 910 miles
per hour.

Matos smiled for the first time since he had catapulted off the deck of the
Nimitz
. No Hercules turbo-prop could match even half that performance. Very few aircraft could. High-altitude supersonic flight
was the province of missiles, special target drones, and advanced fighters, bombers, and spy planes. He would know of any
such friendly craft in his area unless they had gotten off course. Two possibilities remained: The first was that it was an
enemy aircraft, in which case he wouldn’t get a medal for shooting it down, but he wouldn’t be court-martialed either. It
would be covered up and he would be the secret envy of every flight officer aboard. It had happened before.

The second possibility was the more likely. The profile being flown by the target on his screen was very close to the predicted
performance of the drone.
The Hercules must have released two drones, either by mistake or by design.
That must be it. Matos felt better. His naval career had a fair chance now. He had to call the
Nimitz
immediately. Explain. He could still relocate the other target, fire the missile, do a turnaround, and get the hell out of
there. He looked down again at the radar screen. The distance between the Phoenix and its target lessened rapidly. Thirty
miles, twenty miles, ten miles. Then the missile and the target merged, became one. Matos nodded. The missile worked. That
much they now knew. But he was left wondering what he had hit.

John Berry pushed the stopper valve halfway and turned on the water until the basin filled, then adjusted the taps until the
inflowing water equaled the draining water. He took off his wristwatch and laid it on the aluminum shelf. 11:02. It was still
set to California time. Jet lag was not nearly so bad with the Straton as it was on the conventional jets, but it still caused
his body clock to become disoriented. Time
was
relative. His body was on New York time, his watch was on California time, but he was actually in an obscure time zone called
Samoan-Aleutian, and he would soon land in Tokyo at a different time altogether. Yet at home, time dragged, almost stood still,
hourly, daily, weekly. But that hadn’t stopped him from getting older—in fact, it speeded up his aging process.
Relative. No doubt about it.
He bent over the basin and began splashing water on his face.

The Phoenix missile, with its updated maneuverability, made one small correction and aimed itself so that it would strike
the broad port side of the midfuselage slightly above the leading edge of the wing. Somewhere in the circuitry, the sensors,
the microcomputer of the Phoenix—the place that was the seat of its incomplete powers of judgment and reason—there might have
been a sense or an awareness that it had succeeded in its purpose. And having no fear, no hesitation, no instinct for survival,
it accelerated headlong into its prey, consigning it, and itself, into oblivion.

A middle-aged man sitting in aisle 15, seat A, glanced out the window. He noticed a silvery spot at least a mile away. He
blinked. The spot was now as large as a basketball and a few inches outside the window. Before his brain could transmit even
the most primitive response of ducking or screaming, the silver orb was through the window, taking a section of the fuselage
and his head and torso with it. The Phoenix plowed across the remaining two seats in the section, B and C, disintegrating
the passenger’s wife and mother. It crossed the aisle to the middle section, pushing some of its grisly harvest with it, and
swept away the four center seats, D, E, F, and G, and the passengers in them, then crossed the starboard aisle. It then pushed
seats H, J, and K, with three more passengers, through the fuselage and, along with other collected debris, out into the void.

Everything in the Phoenix’s path, its wake, and a yard on either side of it, was pulverized by the high-speed disintegration
of the fuselage wall. Seats and people were turned into unrecognizable forms and their high-speed disintegration in turn reduced
people and objects near them to smashed and torn remnants of what they had been. With no warhead on the missile there was,
of course, no explosion—but the impact forces had the same effect on everything in its path.

The deceleration had caused the Phoenix to begin to tumble as it reached the third gang of seats. Its tail rose up and it
hit the starboard sidewall broadside, cutting, as it exited, an elongated swath nearly eight feet high and six feet across.
It tumbled out into space, dragging more metal and flesh with it. Its energies spent, the Phoenix continued for only a short
distance before it faltered and fell, end over end, twelve miles down into the Pacific Ocean.

The first sound that John Berry heard was an indistinct noise, as if a high shelf stacked with rolls of sheet metal had been
knocked over. He felt the aircraft bump slightly. Before he could even raise his head from the basin, he heard a rushing noise,
a roar, that sounded like someone had opened the window of a speeding subway train. He straightened up quickly and froze for
a second until his senses could take in all the stimuli. The flight was steady, the water was still running in the tap, the
lights were on, and the rushing sound was lower now. Everything seemed nearly normal, but something—his pilot’s instincts—told
him he was flying in a dying aircraft.

Outside, in the cabin, the enormous quantity of internal pressurized air began to exit through the gaping holes in the Straton’s
fuselage. All the small, loose objects onboard—glasses, trays, hats, papers, briefcases—were immediately propelled through
the cabin, and were either wedged behind something stationary or sucked out the holes.

The passengers sat quietly for a long second, completely unable to comprehend what had just happened. There was no point of
reference in their minds for it. The normal reactions of screaming, quickened heartbeat, adrenaline flow, fight or flight,
were absent. They reacted with only silence and stillness amid the noises of rushing air.

Like a growing tidal wave, the escaping air was gathering momentum.

A baby was sucked out of its uncomprehending mother’s arms and hurled along over the heads of the passengers and out the starboard
hole and into the nothingness of space.

Someone screamed.

Three unaccompanied children, a boy and two girls, in seats H, J, and K, aisle 13, near the starboard hole, had not fastened
their seat belts and were picked up by the howling wind and sucked out, screeching with terror.

Everyone was screaming now as the sights and sounds around them began to register on their consciousness.

A teenaged girl in aisle 18, seat D, near the port-side aisle, her seat dislocated by the original impact, suddenly found
herself gripping her seat track on the floor, her overturned seat still strapped to her body. The seat belt failed and the
seat shot down the aisle. She lost her grip and was dragged down the aisle by an invisible and extreme force. Her long blonde
hair was pulled taut and her skirt and blouse were stripped from her body. Her eyes were filled with horror as she continued
to fight against the unseen thing that wanted to take her. She dug her nails into the carpet as the racing air pulled her
toward the yawning hole that led outside.

Her cries were unheard by even those passengers who sat barely inches away from her struggle. The noise of the escaping air
was so loud that it was no longer decipherable as sound, but seemed instead a solid thing pounding at the people in their
seats. The events in the cabin took on a horrific aura of pantomime.

Some of the bolts that held other damaged seats to their tracks began to fail. Several gangs of seats broke loose in sequence
and rammed into rows of seats ahead, some of the seats tumbling over the tops of other seats as they rushed toward the hole.
A gang of four seats, the passengers still strapped in, wedged into the smaller entry hole, partly blocking the hole and causing
more suction at the larger exit hole on the starboard side. At the starboard hole, a gang of loosened seats seemed to pile
up like paratroopers nervously bunching up, waiting for their turn to jump. Another flying seat loosened the logjam and one
after the other they all shot out into space, the passengers strapped in them screaming, kicking, and clawing at the air.

John Berry, unaware of what was happening outside, turned the handle of the lavatory door and pulled inward on it. It seemed
to be stuck. He tried again, pulling with all his strength, but the fiberglass door would not budge, though he could see the
latch disengage. He braced both feet against the jamb and with both hands on the latch pulled with every ounce of strength
he could summon. Still it would not move even a fraction of an inch. He was frightened and puzzled. He repeatedly pressed
the assistance call button and waited for help.

As the internal air escaped from the Straton’s tourist cabin, then its first-class cabin and upstairs lounge, the flow of
cabin pressure still being pumped into the aircraft was literally piling up in those areas where it could not so readily escape—the
five lavatories with inward-opening doors. The pressurized air poured into these lavatories through the normal air vents,
and though some of the pressurized air leaked out from around the edges of the lavatory doors, the net trend was positive.
Those five inward-opening fiberglass doors were sealed shut with a differential air pressure of two pounds per square inch,
which added up to four thousand pounds pressing them shut.