Skyhammer (31 page)

Then they heard the crackle as Pate keyed his mike. “Okay, Kelly,” he said. “I’ll land her in Phoenix.”

Both Travis and Lofton let out whoops. But L’Hommedieu sat back with a sigh of utter frustration. It was like being caught
in a maze where every corridor led back to the same dead end.

“We’ve got to get him to agree to land somewhere else,” Searing said. “An isolated field. And force him to do it.”

Now L’Hommcdieu’s frustration vanished. Yes, a vacant field would work. If Pate agreed, they’d know he was giving up. And
he would agree. He’d have to. L’Hommedieu sat forward again and quickly explained their new concern to Kelly.

“There’s an airstrip down at Marana,” Kelly said. “South of Phoenix. The Air Force uses it to park obsolete aircraft.”

“Al1 right,” L’Hommedieu said. “Let’s send him there.”

“Negative on Phoenix, Emil,” Kelly radioed. “You’ve got to land at the Pinal County Airpark. Stand by for a heading.”

They waited through another ten seconds, but Pate didn’t respond.

“Go ahead and give him the heading,” L’Hommedieu said. He listened as the controller transmitted the vector. Then there was
silence again.

“Emil?” Kelly said. “Did you get that?”

“Sorry,” Pate answered finally. “No can do, pardner. I’m going on in to Phoenix.”

L’Hommedieu put his hands over his face, stunned by the words. Didn’t Pate realize their threat was real? “Tell him,” L’Hommedieu
whispered. “Tell him we’ll shoot him down.”

“They’ll shoot you down, buddy,” Kelly radioed.

“I said I’d land,” Pate answered immediately. “Besides, you need presidential approval for that, and I don’t think you’ll
get it because of who’s on board. You knew about him, didn’t you? Senator Sanford?”

“We’ve already
got
approval,” Kelly lied. “Come on, Emil. Don’t go down like this.”

“Got to.”

Pate was silent. They heard his mike click. L’Hommedieu knew intuitively that the man was trying to think of some final thing
to say. He pressed his own handset switch, cutting in on Kelly. His mind raced, searching for the right words.

“Emil, Katherine was right,” he said quietly, hoping Pate would listen. “You can’t let your pride do this to you. Only if
you go through with it—then you’re condemned.”

“L’Hommedieu?” Pate said.

“You did nothing wrong. And you aren’t Coyote, Emil. And Jack Farraday isn’t the only monster. There’ll be another and—”

He was stopped by the shriek of Pate’s microphone switch. “Listen!” Pate shouted. “New World Five fifty-five is proceeding
to Phoenix via the Foss! Two. I’m out of three one zero. Shoot me down if you have to.”

And then he was gone. “He’s switched off again,” Kelly said after a minute. “I think maybe that’s it, Homm.”

His stomach suddenly aching, L’Hommedieu turned to look at Searing. Then he slumped forward. Everything had gone out of him.

“I’m calling the president now,” Searing said quietly. “We’ve got to go through with it.”

L’Hommedieu nodded. He sat still, watching Searing make the call. Had he done all he could? He would never know, and that
was the worst of it. Could they get the airport evacuated in time? He didn’t think so. It didn’t matter anyway. Five-fifty-five
would never get there.

A minute later Kelly was back on the line. “He’s started his descent, Homm. What do we do?”

L’Hommedieu had to swallow the dryness in his throat. “Have them get Shadow back into position,” he said.

Sky Harbor Airport

Phoenix, Arizona

20:23 GMT/13:23 MST

Virgil Bensen, the deputy director standing in for the Airport Authority director on this Saturday, had been briefed the first
time almost two hours ago: A New World plane, originally bound for his airport, had been hijacked, and he was to prepare a
restricted area, ready emergency crews, and coordinate with the Phoenix police department’s Special Operations and the FBI.
An hour later he had been briefed again: Maintain readiness, but now the plane would likely be diverted to another airfield.
Four minutes ago he had received a final instruction: Evacuate Terminal 4 in fifteen minutes, starting with the New World
Airlines concourse. If Bensen had had time to, he would have thrown a shitfit. Whoever the hell was running things had screwed
up royally. What did they think, he could perform miracles? All the orderly plans for evacuation, drawn up years ago during
the last wave of international terrorism, weren’t worth a lead peso with so little time. And you couldn’t just put out a PA:
“Everyone, please leave immediately.” That was a sure-fire way to start a panic.

Panic was the problem. If they tried to move people too rapidly, someone would leap to a conclusion, go bananas, and panic
would shoot through the whole crowd like a flu bug. So they had to do it calmly and methodically, and they had to have a plausible,
non-threatening reason. A support-power-system failure, he’d decided. Not a global failure—they couldn’t fake it—but a bogus
failure of the system that supported the planes. The crowd wouldn’t even understand it, and then, starting with the New World
concourse, they would tell everyone they were merely shuttlebusing them to another terminal to meet their flights.

It would be a race against rumor, though. No doubt, people on the concourse had been picking up the story from TV news bulletins.
They’d start putting two and two together as soon as New World operations began deplaning passengers. And since New World
was already rerouting the inbounds to other airports, more and more airport personnel would be catching on that something
was up. Any minute, stories would start, leaks develop.

He hurried down the corridor to the New World concourse, leading a cadre of security personnel. Maybe, just maybe, with adequate
and effective direction, this hare-brained scheme would work out. Reminding his men they had scarcely more than twenty minutes,
Bensen dispatched his people to their stations. He and ten men would make announcements to the passengers waiting on the concourse.
Five would man the cordoned-off corridor connecting the concourse to the main terminal.

Four staff members stationed themselves ahead of the others, their task to keep any passengers from carrying the news prematurely
to the farther gates. The other six, three on each side, began to announce the power-system failure. Bensen, stationing himself
at Gate 26—the first waiting area—watched the passengers. People registered dismay, then grudging compliance. The crowd was
moving far too slowly, but atleast they were buying it without suspicion. He was cautiously optimistic. Every passenger was
an unknown variable, however, capable of altering all the others. After nearly twenty years in the business, he knew about
crowd psychology. And airport crowds weren’t like, say, baseball crowds. These people were all tense—the drinkers, the businessmen
who seemed lost in their files, and even the ones who didn’t show it. They worried about arriving on time, finding their luggage
intact, or climbing into machines that looked too heavy and slow to even lift themselves off the ground. Most people could
rationally understand that with thousands of flights daily the odds were vastly in their favor. Just the same, deep down,
most couldn’t shake the belief that fate was waiting to single them out. It was human nature. Even Bensen, whenever he flew,
had tinglings of dread just before touchdown.

Bensen moved forward now, walking against the tide and smiling to show that there was no reason for alarm. Up ahead, at Gates
29 and 30, his men were making their announcements. Passengers there were shaking their heads, rising from their seats, hefting
their bags. The lower concourse was filling, everyone moving reluctantly ahead. The floor beneath his feet vibrated slightly.
Bensen caught snatches of complaint, disgruntled voices.

There was a commotion now, beyond Gate 30. From the Gate 28 waiting area, he could see a man arguing vehemently with two of
the blockers. The man wanted to get past them, head in the wrong direction. People were tuning to look. Suddenly another man
pushed through into the crowd, stumbling as he did so, breaking stride as if he meant to start running. Everyone was turning
now to stare.

Then Bensen saw something that made his heart beat hard. On the TV monitor in the bar across the walkway, was a picture of
the airport, an aerial view. Even as- he watched, hoping it wasn’t true, the newscaster appeared again, and behind him the
image of New World Airlines’ logo. People leaving the bar were turning back to look. Then, an invisible wave seemed to ripple
through the crowd, spreading out and down the concourse. The pitch of voices rose. Someone was running, shoving his way past
the rows of seats. A woman tried to follow him, but her suitcase swung sideways behind her and banged against one of the support
pillars. She fell. A dozen people scrambled around her. Passengers were spilling out of the concourse bars and restaurants.
Now, the whole mass of them was surging forward. “He’s headed for the airport!” someone shouted.

If Bensen had been observing the scene on videotape, he might have marveled at the geometry of the pandemonium breaking out.
But if anyone were injured, it would be his head on the block. He stepped back into the shelter of a pillar, shouting vainly
there was no need to panic. The crowd was running full out, though, making a noise that sounded like a single angry shout.
A dozen were down already, trying to get back on their feet. A mother struggled past, dragging two screaming little girls
behind her like luggage. One old man tottered now in the midst of the swarm, his eyes startled in fear. As Bensen pulled him
behind the safety of the pillar, he saw one of his staffers climb over a row of seats and come running down the line of waiting
areas, yelping at the mob like some kind of cowboy trying to head off a cattle stampede. It was futile. The mass had turned
the corner and started down the connecting tunnel to the main terminal. They broke through the cordon. All Bensen could do
now was wait for them to pass, then try to get first aid to the injured. And things would get worse when they reached the
main lobby. He cursed under his breath, remembering how he’d opposed the design of the new terminal—the fact that it connected
to the lower-level exits via two long, narrow escalators. When the mob got there, it’d be like a flash flood trying to go
down a bathtub drain.

Overwhelmed by frustration, abruptly infuriated, he turned suddenly and yanked an emergency phone from its bracket. He punched
in his office number. “Put me on line three,” he ordered. In another moment someone answered. “Better do something fast,”
he shouted. “The goddamn news bulletins just screwed everything out here!”

Passenger Cabin

New World 555

20:25 GMT/15:25 EST

The plane was crossing over a deck of cirro-stratus, thin and uneven, several thousand feet thick. Sometimes 555 was in it,
skimming the tops, and sometimes the plane was several hundred feet above the cloud layer. Now the deck obscured the ground,
and the light beyond David Crane’s window was a luminous white, the wingtip disappearing, reappearing, the strobe on its trailing
edge flashing steadily, reassuringly.

Mariella Ponti’s concerns about the flight crew were still bothering him, but Crane had decided not to take any action. Not
that Ponti didn’t seem level-headed, but in general flight attendants overreacted to operational problems—at least he knew
that’s what most seasoned pilots thought. And maybe he did, too, to some extent. Although, to Ponti’s credit, she hadn’t asked
him to talk to the cockpit. He didn’t want to. He could imagine what a captain might say about some newly hired first officer
calling up from the cabin to see if everything was all right. Why draw attention to himself while he was still on probation?
If anything, the captain was probably sick as a dog and the copilot covering for him. Things out of the ordinary usually had
a very ordinary cause. He wouldn’t let a minor inconsistency lead him to any wild conclusions. Growing up as a farm kid in
Nebraska, Crane had learned to be prepared for surprises but not to expect them. His parents had run a dairy farm—not an occupation
for anyone with a pessimistic outlook. Instead you trusted in the odds and in your own prudence.

The cloud layer dropped away again, and he looked down at it, a hundred feet below the plane now. The sun was just behind
them, on the opposite side, and he could see the plane’s shadow skimming along the cloud, surrounded by a thin, brilliant
ring of multi-hued light—like a rainbow—a parhelion effect. He’d seen these before, though only rarely, during his T-38 instructor
days in the Air Force. Crane wondered if they were leaving a contrail and if contrails left shadows subject to the same effect.
A contrail would begin fifty feet or so behind the airplane, if they were leaving one, so he leaned forward, searching the
area aft of 555’s shadow.

At that moment, the cloud top dropped away farther, to a thousand feet or more below the plane’s flight level. The aircraft’s
shadow became a fragment of dark on the white field—two fragments, in fact. A double shadow? That was curious. Now 555 was
back in the cloud again, but the image stayed in Crane’s mind like a snapshot. Two shadows, yes, but not of the same plane.
He was sure of that. The one had been big, long bodied; the other small, with short wings. A fighter plane—he was sure of
this, too. An F-15, if he knew his silhouettes. It had been very close to them. Way too close. Crane breathed in, let it out,
telling himself to stay calm. But why would an F-15 be flying so close? No Air Force pilot would be that crazy. Unless it
was deliberately tailing them. But why?

For another moment Crane stared out at the white light beyond the window, trying to sort out a plausible reason. Ponti hadn’t
talked to the pilot since takeoff. And the copilot had sounded strange. If it weren’t so far-fetched he would think that someone
had . ..

But the idea was crazy, wasn’t it? Crane’s heart seemed to tighten. He recoiled hack against his seat, sucking in breath.
Where was Ponti? She would’ve found out by now what was really going on. He looked up, searching over the heads of the other
passengers for her. She had gone back into first class some time ago. Just when he was about to get up and go forward, she
stepped back through the curtain separating first class from coach. She smiled left, then right. Then her eyes met his, and
the smile vanished. She could see he was alarmed. For the merest moment she, too, seemed scared. Then she regained her composure.
As if everything were fine, she began to make her way back.