“Jim, what’s he doing up there?” Karen asked, her face ashen, her hand now squeezing the blood out of his. His answer stalled in the back of his mind as he fumbled for his seat belt. “Stay here. I’m going to the cockpit.”
She said nothing, letting his hand slide reluctantly from hers as he rose from the seat and pulled away, glancing back for a second, noting how beautiful she was.
The MD-11’s roll had reversed back to the right. The nose was coming back up slightly, but the control movements had become jerky and excessive, as if the pilots were fighting the aircraft. Jim moved forward quickly, his eyes on the cockpit door some eighty feet away, aware that his intervention in another airline’s affairs would be unwelcome. He could see two flight attendants ahead of him, their eyes betraying concern, their professional smiles trying to mask it.
The growing asymmetrical G-force was pulling him off balance, pushing him into the row of seats to the right. Jim fought to stand upright, but the cabin was heeling over like a yacht about to capsize in a gale, the MD-11’s right turn obviously uncoordinated, as someone’s foot pushed the left rudder pedal.
What the hell? Jim thought. There were gasps of fear around him as he struggled to keep moving forward. Something was very wrong, but it couldn’t be loss of control. The flight controls were operating but being jerked in crazy directions.
He moved with urgency, supporting his weight on the seat backs, his hands brushing the heads of startled passengers. In the galley ahead he could hear plates and utensils sliding and clattering, some spilling from the service carts as a wide-eyed young blonde in a flight attendant’s uniform spotted him.
“Sir!” Her hand shot out, the palm extended. “SIR! Take your seat immediately and fasten your seat belt!” She moved into the aisle to block him.
“I’m a pilot!” he said, regretting the lame response.
“I don’t care, Sir…” she began, stopping in midsentence as the gravity went fully to zero and she floated up before his eyes toward the ceiling.
Ahead of Jim, two dozen shafts of sunlight stabbed across the first-class cabin from each window and moved vertically from low to high as the aircraft rolled to the right. He grabbed the bulkhead and propelled himself past the flight attendant like an astronaut, his peripheral vision picking up the ocean’s surface through the windows.
We’re inverted! The potentially fatal fact was merely a benchmark in an impossibly bizarre sequence. His entire being focused on the cockpit door less than thirty feet ahead. The door would be locked. He had to get there, get in, and stop whatever was happening!
The huge MD-11 was still rolling, coming back right side up as gravity once again claimed the occupants of the cabin, and people and service carts and flight attendants crashed to the floor. Ahead of him half the overhead compartments had popped open, spilling their contents into the air, pummeling the passengers below.
An elderly woman had floated up from her seat during the zero-G maneuver, then crashed painfully to the floor. Her body was blocking the aisle ahead as Jim tried to step over her and tripped. The G-forces increased as the scream of the high-speed airflow outside rose, forcing the nose up as they continued to roll, undoubtedly hurtling now toward the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
Jim’s hands clawed for a seat back, raking across a man’s head in the process. There were sharp cries of fear from all around him. Once more he pulled with all his might, launching himself through the air and slamming into the back of the cockpit door with a painful thud. He pulled frantically at it and found it locked, as expected.
Time had dilated, seconds moving past like minutes, the feeling of running from a horror and getting nowhere overwhelming him. There was no way to tell if they were upside down or right side up, but they were diving, with only seconds left.
Jim braced his feet against the doorjamb and pulled.
It wouldn’t budge.
He pulled again, harder, but the lock was too strong.
The airspeed increased. They couldn’t be more than 10,000 feet above the surface. The whine of the slipstream was deafening. A mental snapshot of his bride-to-be alone in the cabin behind him drove him on. He tightened his grip on the door handle, willed himself beyond the limits, and heaved backward, feeling an explosion of pain in his hands as the rising, screaming sound of nearly supersonic flight washed out all other sensations.
The door broke open and he forced himself into the cockpit in time to see the windscreen fill with the sight of white caps and blue water as the MD-11 traversed the last few yards to the surface in the space of his last heartbeat.
CHAPTER 1
FBI Special Agent Katherine Bronsky yelped as she fell backward across the far edge of the king-size bed and rolled out of sight behind it, landing on her hip with an unceremonious thud.
Wonderful! she thought, Another bruise the size of Cleveland.
“Kat? KAT?”
The male voice coming from the speaker of her notebook computer wafted over the bed to compete with the vibrant roar of downtown Hong Kong’s living wave of sound, which cascaded through the partially open balcony doors.
Kat lifted herself to a sitting position and peeked over the bed as she blew a wayward strand of hair away from her eyes, feeling like a klutz.
Now that was embarrassing! Thank goodness he can’t see me.
Assistant Deputy Director Jake Rhoades’s puzzled expression was clearly visible on her computer screen as he made a futile effort to see her from his end in Washington. There was a tiny camera built into the lid of her laptop computer, but she’d draped a pair of panties over it while dressing. The new secure video capability was fun, but there were limits to what she wanted Washington to see.
“I guess in the interest of full disclosure I should admit that the thud you heard was me hitting the floor. I tripped,” she explained in a loud voice, leaving out the fact that she’d tangled her feet in her own panty hose and all but hog-tied herself. “Sorry to interrupt what you were saying. You were in the process of warning me not to embarrass the Bureau, but you hadn’t said why.”
He ignored the reference. “You sure everything’s okay there? I still can’t see you. My screen is just showing a gauzy white.”
“I don’t want you to see me.” Kat laughed as she began hopping again on one foot across the plush rug toward the desk, trying once more to pull on the other leg of her panty hose as she glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “I’m not decent.”
There was a pause and a wicked chuckle from Washington. “Well… now that you mention it… there are those in the Bureau who would agree with you, Kat.”
She finished adjusting the panty hose as she shook her head in mock disgust, glad he couldn’t see the gesture. “I meant, Sir, that I’m not appropriately attired to appear on your computer screen in front of my brother agents, some of whom may not be gender-blind.”
“Ah. Then I’m technically glad you didn’t, since I wouldn’t want to be accused of sexual enjoyment.”
“That’s harassment, Jake. You wouldn’t want to be accused of sexual harassment.”
“That too. Look, let’s get back to the Cuban crash, okay?”
Kat moved behind the desk to look at herself in the full-length mirror, listening carefully to what he was saying but substantially pleased by what she saw. Fifteen pounds lighter in the last six months, with a firm stomach at last, was something to be proud of. Solid evidence of the self-discipline she expected of herself.