“TWO HUNDRED FORTY DEGREES!” Dallas yelled back.
The hail ended as suddenly as it began, leaving a wall of rain in its place. Dallas could see Dan flailing around the overhead panel, feeling for a certain switch.
“WHAT DO YOU NEED, DAN?” She could hear his rapid breathing.
“ANTI–ICE. THERE!” He clicked on the wing and engine anti-ice systems, his hand repeatedly bouncing off the overhead surface as they lurched through air currents that seemed sure to tear the jumbo apart.
“Geoff! Roll back to the right,” Dallas barked in his ear.
There was no reply, just a nod, but the 747 responded, the roll to the right throwing all of them slightly to the left.
Again a wall of hail and rain and lightning and turbulence engulfed them, and the altitude decreased as Geoff struggled to keep the attitude and bank angle under control. The impacts of flying into shifting air currents at over 200 knots of airspeed bounced them too much to permit reading the instruments at times, and moment by moment the passenger flying in the left seat had to cope with recovering from a severe roll to the left or right, or a severe nose up or down attitude.
“GEOFF! WE’RE DESCENDING. WE’RE GOING DOWN THROUGH THREE THOUSAND!” Dallas shouted. “GEOFF! PULL IT UP!”
“I’M TRYING!” Geoff cried.
“THIS FEELS LIKE A DOWNDRAFT!” Dan yelled. “ALTITUDE?”
“TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED. DESCENDING FAST.”
“PULL IT UP, GEOFF! NOW!” Dan ordered.
“WE’RE BELOW TWO THOUSAND!” Dallas yelled in Geoff’s ear, watching him haul back on the yoke timidly. The nose came up to ten degrees as the altitude continued to wind down.
“WHAT’S HAPPENING? TALK TO ME, DALLAS!” Dan demanded, his hands holding on to the yoke and trying to follow what was going on. “WHAT’S OUR PITCH ATTITUDE?”
“TWELVE DEGREES UP!” Dallas yelled back. “AIRSPEED DECREASING, NOW TWO HUNDRED TWENTY.”
Dan grabbed the control yoke and yanked hard without warning. “TELL ME WHEN WE’RE THIRTY DEGREES NOSE UP OR LESS THAN ONE HUNDRED FIFTY KNOTS!” he commanded.
“WE’RE DROPPING THROUGH ONE THOUSAND FEET, DAN!” Dallas yelled. “OH, LORD! WE’RE GONNA HIT!” Anguish was creeping into her voice as the 747 continued to descend, the remaining three engines at maximum power, the nose pitched up to a frightening deck angle. To her right, Robert MacCabe and Britta Franz hung on to the seat backs and watched the altimeter unwinding in detached silence.
“WE’RE THIRTY DEGREES NOSE UP. SPEED’S ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY.”
“ALTITUDE?”
“COMING THROUGH FIVE HUNDRED FEET… FOUR HUNDRED… DAN, IT’S SLOWING, BUT WE’RE STILL DESCENDING!”
CHAPTER 13
The facility chief sat down hard next to one of his controllers and shook his head, his eyes on the computer-generated control screen. “You saw him descending, and then lost the transponder?”
The wide-eyed controller nodded in a staccato motion. “Yes, Sir.”
“Where did you lose him? What altitude?”
“Two thousand feet, descending at over two thousand feet per minute. He had made a broad turn back west.”
“How long ago?”
“Seven minutes ago. I called you immediately.”
The chief took a deep breath and shook his head, feeling the weight of the loss. There had been over 200 people on that aircraft, but if they had hit the water at a hefty descent rate in the middle of the night, the survival chances were minimal.
“Very well. Start the notifications. You know what to do.”
The controller turned to the task of notifying rescue forces and the world that Meridian Flight 5 had crashed at sea.
The President of the United States swept through the east door of the most familiar office in the world and nodded to the Air Force chief of staff — a four-star general — and the press secretary, who had assembled for an emergency telephone conference on the unfolding aerial crisis in Hong Kong. He shook the general’s hand and settled into a chair near the lighted fireplace, looking to Jason Pullman, the press secretary, whose finger was poised over a speakerphone. “Who’s on the line, Jason?” he asked.
“Richard Herd, the director of Central Intelligence; FBI Deputy Director Jake Rhoades; and Dr. Stella Mendenhall at the National Transportation Safety Board.”
The President nodded and Jason punched through the conference call. There was a brief round of hellos.
“All right,” the President began, “on this end we’ve got General Tim Bauer, Air Force Chief of Staff, and Jason Pullman, my press secretary. Now, who called the meeting?”
“I did, Mr. President,” Herd, the DCI, responded. “The rumors are going to start flying on this one, and I felt you needed to be briefed immediately.”
“What rumors, Richard?”
“Unfounded rumors that this Hong Kong situation is somehow connected to the SeaAir crash near Cuba, and that Hong Kong is, in fact, an act of terrorism.”
“Is it?” the President asked.
“We don’t think so on either count, Mr. President, but we don’t know yet.”
The President sighed. “Okay, Richard, give me the briefing.”
The DCI filled in the facts to the moment, detailing the possibility of midair collision versus airborne attack before the President interrupted him.
“Wait a minute,” the President said. “You say the remaining pilot also mentioned the possibility of a nuclear detonation?”
“Oh, it definitely wasn’t that, Sir,” the DCI replied. “National Reconnaissance Office confirms their sensors have picked up nothing nuclear.”
“What, then?” the President continued. “You said a midair collision or some sort of attack, but to have a midair, someone’s got to be missing an airplane.”
“Well, there is an aircraft missing,” the DCI said, relating the puzzle of the U.S. business jet and the fact that FAA was still verifying who owned it.
The President leaned forward, twirling a fountain pen in his fingers, his eyes on the floor. “And the third possibility is some sort of attack? What sort of attack? Military? Terrorist? And using what, a missile?”
General Bauer raised a finger. “Sir, we have no reason whatsoever to suspect hostile military action. This was a scheduled airline flight, ten miles from Hong Kong’s airport, on a normal departure track. No way would the Chinese Air Force be involved. Now, if we’re talking about what kind of an attack could blind two pilots…”
“That boggles my mind,” the President interjected, shaking his head. “The captain dead, the copilot blinded. How?”
The DCI spoke up before the general could answer. “Any large flash, such as a direct lightning strike or fuel exploding during a collision, could temporarily flash-blind the pilots. We know of nothing that could kill with a burst of light alone, but whatever happened probably triggered a secondary reaction, a heart attack or a stroke.”
“General, you weren’t finished?” the President said.
“I was going to say, Sir,” General Bauer continued, “that the intensity of the so-called explosion this surviving pilot reported is not inconsistent with the burst of a phosphorous-based warhead at very close range. A lightning strike wouldn’t do it.”
“A what?” the President exclaimed, sitting up and cocking his head.
“Phosphorous, Sir. The flash against a nighttime background is devastatingly bright. If someone lobbed a small missile at them with such a warhead designed to explode just in front of the aircraft, I’m told it could seriously interfere with a pilot’s vision for several hours.”