“Judith, is what happened going to affect the trial?”
“Other than pissing off a judge who loves to overreact? Actually, I don’t think so. You didn’t violate any court orders, and attempted suicide isn’t illegal — though in ancient Rome it was a capital offense punishable by, wait for it, death. But in this case, in short, I don’t think it hurts or helps us, but I could be missing something.”
“Missing something?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Yes. That actually happened once. Meantime, I have an assignment for you. Think of it a trial prep.”
“Okay.”
“Seriously, Marty, I am not unaware or unsympathetic to how much this is torturing you, each time you have to re-live the crash and everything that led up to it, but I really need you to go over the last twenty minutes of the flight sequence with great care… meticulously, in fact. Write notes. Use bullet points. Leave out nothing.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say something’s missing from the logic of the story, and I have to know what. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that you’re purposefully leaving something out, but some dots just refuse to connect. Also, I need you in my office in one week for a boot camp on surviving a criminal prosecution, and then we go to trial in three weeks.”
“And after that?” he asked, meaning the question to be sarcastic but surprised at the hunted look that suddenly crossed his lawyer’s face like the shadow of a fast building cumulonimbus.
Judith stepped toward him, her eyes on the floor for a second, her lips pursed, before she looked up.
“Marty, I’m going to presume that by then you will be a free man who can re-start his life. I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee someone doesn’t bomb the courtroom and kill us all, or that we aren’t obliterated by an asteroid, or that you won’t have a massive coronary, or for that matter that I won’t have one during opening arguments. But in the meantime, I simply refuse to see you as anything but free.”
“Thank you.”
In the dead of night an innocuous noise somewhere down the hospital corridor caused Marty to jolt awake as if jabbed in the ass with a red hot poker. Once awake, the only apparent pathway back to a tortured nightmare-ridden sleep was through the nurses and the hospital’s pharmacy, and there was nothing to be gained with that approach. Besides, Judith wanted an excruciatingly detailed review from him of the last twenty minutes of Regal Flight 12, and now was as good a time as any.
He felt a heavy shroud of sadness settle around him as he sat there in the bed, torn between despair over having been robbed of his final exit from all this pain, and yet entertaining a faint flicker of hope that he would be heard; and that maybe he was no longer alone in this fight.
But fight for what? To prove he’d been right that night? Or just to beg license to consider himself a decent, if deeply flawed, human.
As the image of the 757 cockpit coalesced again around him, Marty took a deep breath and submerged once more into the prison of his personal memory.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Seven Months before — January 21st
Regal 12
The temptation to accelerate the process and get the stricken 757 on the ground had grown to an internal imperative as primal as the human need to run from a monster. Marty recognized the syndrome. That form of “get-home-itis” had killed better airmen than him.
The controls had been given over to Ryan so Marty could force himself to think clearly and as free of panic as possible. It was a logical idea, but it wasn’t working. His thoughts — propelled by the cascading urgency of everything real and imagined — were a confused cacophony clamoring for attention like a classroom of agitated 3rd graders.
I’ve done the final briefing with Ryan, but he has to back me up on the spoilers… wait, remember, there won’t be any! Okay, reverse thrust is going to be our only friend after the brakes, and the braking factor down there is poor in the last report. Do I need to make another PA to the passengers? No… Nancy and the crew have it under control.
The very real monster, he understood, was the dropoff at the end of Runway 7, and it was time he faced it. The numbers and the graphs were not subjective. There was no flexibility in the cold hard prediction that there wasn’t enough slippery runway in a blizzard for a big jet traveling a hundred knots faster than normal. Even if he slammed the 757 on right at the beginning of Runway 7, 230 knots of momentum was a huge amount of extra energy to dissipate, and the only tools he would have probably weren’t enough — especially if the tires blew or the brakes were more ineffective than figured. What then?
If I can’t stop her, should I run off the left side of the runway onto the taxiway? There’s a drop there, too, alongside, but maybe it wouldn’t be that lethal.
Face it, he told himself, everything was stacked against them if he didn’t reduce his approach speed significantly under 230 knots. He’d known it for the last forty minutes and been doing everything possible to treat the reality like the iconic three monkeys refusing to perceive evil. But there was a brutal binary choice, and it was as unyielding as granite: Slow down and make a safe landing and in the process sacrifice those people on the wing that were only there because of his mistake; or, stay at 230 knots to touchdown to save the occupants of Mountaineer while rolling the dice that skidding off the end of Runway 7 and down the slope at the eastern end would not seriously injure anyone.
After nearly losing the Beech 1900 fuselage in his experimentation with a slower airspeed, there was no longer any doubt that lower airspeed meant certain death for the occupants of Mountaineer 2612. It wasn’t a gamble, it was a certainty.
Railing against the siren in his soul that screamed that there had to be another way, Marty locked down his decision: If it was a contest between certain death on one hand and a chance of everyone coming through on the other, he’d take the chance.
His thoughts were interrupted by the warbling of the satellite phone, and in the vain hope that it might bring unexpected deliverance, he answered it even though it had to be Paul Butterfield on the other end from Minneapolis — and was.
“Captain, we need to know your decision and your plan.”
“Sir, we tried slowing and we almost lost the Beech at two hundred twenty knots. I’m maintaining two thirty knots and I’ll land at two thirty knots with flaps at eleven, which is as far out as we could get them before asymmetry. That’s the best we can do.”
“I understand we’re talking about Runway Seven, and you do understand it has almost no overrun, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And braking is reported nil?”
“No, braking is reported poor.”
“How’s your fuel?”
“We’ll have ten to fifteen thousand at touchdown, most in the left main.”
A long sigh and a long silence from Minneapolis marked the calm before the storm, and Butterfield didn’t disappoint.
“Captain Mitchell, you’re in charge… it’s your decision… but we own the airplane and the liability, and, Captain, I have no choice but to relay to you what this company all the way to the chairman of the board desperately wants, and that’s to take no chances with the lives of the passengers on our airplane. That may sound incredibly harsh, but nothing here is an easy judgment. And, in the final analysis, who’s to say that fuselage won’t stay attached? After all, the intensity of the airflow will be diminishing as you slow at the same rate you’d have to increase your angle of attack.”
“Who’s to say? I’m to one to say… me and the other captain over there who would be dead now if I’d slowed any more. Bottom line? I will not kill those people, sir. I’m remaining at 230.”