There was nothing on the monitors to explain his sudden shift of attention. Of course, he’d been on alert all afternoon. Too many years of subconscious monitoring, he figured, his ear fine-tuned to police and fire radio channels, and now all of that supplemented by the visual addition of all the local and cable channels with their speakers off.
Something, though, had yanked the chain of his otherwise engaged conscious mind.
He looked around the newsroom, but no one was demonstrating the behavior of a newsroom on the scent of a new story — no one had popped up like a disturbed prairie dog.
There it was again, a short transmission, but coming from a desk to his right, and he realized one of the other long-time reporters — an inveterate pilot — had left his handheld aviation scanner on. That was it! Suddenly it had burst into activity.
Scott moved to the adjacent vacant desk and examined the little radio, reading a combination of aviation-only radio channels. It was jumping from frequency to frequency like any scanner, and once again it snagged an urgent voice.
“Roger… what are… I mean… how can we help you?”
Seconds went by before the reply as Scott wondered what he’d missed, and what phrase had caught his attention. The volume had been so low… how could he have understood anything from the distance of his desk?
“Just… ah… vectors, Denver, to the longest runway you’ve got at DIA.”
That was enough. He turned up the volume and moved back to his desk to trigger his computerized Rolodex and find the restricted numbers he kept for Denver International and the FAA’s Denver Tracon facility. The list populated into detail across his side-by-side computer screens and he examined the listings, wondering which ones would generate overly cautious spokesmen with an arsenal of defensive answers. The airline and aviation world were awash in paranoids afraid to even admit there were reporters in the world, let alone talk to one.
An unlisted line he knew penetrated deep into the control positions of Denver Tracon caught his eye. He’d surreptitiously copied it down during a tour the previous year. To use it now would be risky, but his internally generated need to know was pegged out, and he sat back down and punched in the number in the one line that never transmitted caller ID, composing what to say.
The line was answered instantly with a no nonsense male voice and a terse repetition of his controller position number, then the phone transmitter clicking off as the man released the little transmit button on his handset.
“This is Bogosian,” Scott said, matching the brusk, authoritative air. “What are you working that requires the whole runway? I understand we need to keep it completely plowed?”
“Yeah… he’ll need it all. It’s a Regal seven-fifty-seven, Flight 12… just took off and may have midaired someone on departure near Broomfield. And… I’m not sure of all of it but he’s apparently controllable but asking for the longest runway, so, yeah… we’ll need all of it. Can you keep it open?”
“Who did he hit?” Scott asked, instinct overriding caution, instantly aware he’d gone too far. Whoever the controller thought he was talking to, that question didn’t make sense, and there was a tiny, telling hesitation on the other end.
“Wait, who is this? Airport ops?”
“Gotta go. Thanks.” He clicked the line off and replaced the receiver.
Damn! A Midair! And whoever he hit is probably already on the ground.
Scott wondered whether to alert the paper’s television news counterpart and give substance to the loose partnership with the TV station across town. It was probably inevitable, he decided. But handing broadcast people breaking news they weren’t aware of always felt like surrendering a once-in-a-lifetime scoop to the infidels. Sometimes they’d throw a crumb and give the Post on-air credit. Usually not. Of course, he couldn’t remember a time someone over there had called him with a breaking story.
Instead, Scott pulled up the phone number of the Broomfield Police Department and punched it in. If something had fallen out of the sky, 911 should be exploding by now.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Seven Months before — January 21st
Minneapolis
Headquarters of Regal Airlines — System Operations Control Center
Normally, the Director of Regal Operations Control Center would not be hanging around the airline’s huge, mission-control style command center so late in the evening, but the thought of showing up at a wedding rehearsal dinner for a woman he detested was enough to keep him at work for a week. The witch was his wife’s friend, not his. It was bad enough he had to put up with her hanging around their house like a dark cloud all the time, bitching and moaning and complaining about life in general. But he couldn’t imagine spending an entire evening with the type of people she must attract — including the presumed loser she had convinced to marry her.
Lying about being unable to leave the command center was a ploy his wife would not forgive if she ever found out. But it was a risk worth taking.
Paul Butterfield had been perseverating over his social deception when word came in from Denver that a local TV station was reporting a Regal flight in trouble. It had taken two control room personnel to decide the call needed to hit the boss’s ear, and after a minute of questioning the frightened person on the other end of the phone, he realized she was one of their operations agents.
“Wait, wait… hold on… I know you’re excited, but I need you to slow down. The TV channel broke in and said what?”
“That our flight twelve has had a midair collision and is coming in for an emergency landing! It just came over the air!”
“We’ve heard nothing from FAA. Where are you physically?”
“Our operations office in Denver.”
“Have you talked to the flight?”
“No, sir. I haven’t heard from them, but someone from the airport command post called and says they really are coming back.”
“And, the flight said there was a midair collision? With whom or what?”
“I… they didn’t say.”
Paul turned to one of the supervisors who was wearing a decidedly pasty expression, his eyes wide.
“Can you get Denver ATC on the phone and check this out?’
“In progress,” he replied, pointing to three men huddled over a bank of phones. .
“And someone get an ACARS message to the crew to tell us what’s going on,” he said, referring to the onboard digital datalink letting them send printed messages to the cockpit.
He pressed the phone back to his ear. “Okay, we’ll take it from here. Alert your maintenance people to stand by and try to call the flight on company frequency. And go to your emergency checklist, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied, her voice trembling. “I just boarded them all less than an hour ago! All those people!”
A flash of sympathy nearly pulled him off target, but there were bigger problems to attend to, and he ended the call as gently as possible. Two tiers of consoles down, two of his people had been huddling over another phone. They turned around suddenly, both trying to talk at once, until one gave way.
“What?” the director asked, aware of the irritation in his tone.
“Paul, our flight apparently rammed a Mountaineer regional flight from behind. A Beech 1900. Our pilots are telling ATC the wreckage of the smaller airplane is stuck on their right wing.”