“Steve—”
Steve’s voice rose to a mocking tone. “Why are you too stupid to hold that flashlight steady, Steven? Steven, I knew you’d screw this up when I asked you to do it. Steven, you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the directions were printed on the heel.” He paused for a second before continuing. “I showed him how stupid I was. It took a lot of hours in the simulators in the middle of a lot of nights, but I taught myself how to fly his precious airplanes!”
Steve shot a quick glance at the copilot, then brought his eyes back to the instruments. “I’m not just a kid, and I’m not stupid! I’m flying your goddamn airplane, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” Dan said carefully, “you are flying this aircraft and doing a magnificent job of it, and I apologize for using the word ‘kid.’”
“Yeah, you can say you’re sorry now because you need me. If we were on the ground, it’d be different. Then it’d be, ‘Go away, kid, you bother me,’ one of my father’s favorite expressions.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Steve.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Look, you want me to treat you like an adult, and that’s reasonable. But that means I’ve got to be able to speak frankly to you. Is that okay?”
Steve was still breathing hard and obviously frightened, but he nodded slowly.
“Yeah. That’s okay.”
“All right. We’ve got a job to do up here, you and I. You’re the only one aboard with working vision who knows anything about flying a plane. I’m the only qualified pilot. If… we can successfully put our capabilities together, we can get through this. I need you to concentrate on the job and try to put both fear and upsets aside, and, before you say anything back, let me remind you that I have to do the same thing. I’m scared to death right now. I really mean that. I’m scared I’m going to screw up and kill everyone, myself included. I’m frightened I… may… never regain my eyesight, and therefore I’ll never be able to do the only thing I know how to do, be a pilot. I’m kicking the hell out of myself for losing control and hitting that tower back there. And I’m in terrible pain… and… I need to go to the bathroom, which means I’m going to have to entrust the lives of the over two hundred people aboard to you.”
There was a long silence from the left seat. “Now that is scary,” Steve Delaney said at last, the shadow of a smile creeping over his face.
“Okay. So if we’re both terrified, it’s easy to strike out at each other, but we can’t afford to do that. Deal?”
“You mean about working together?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Without comparing me to your father.”
“Promise you won’t call me ‘kid’ again?”
“I promise. But what if I get mad at you? What can I call you then?”
“Use ‘Steven Julius Delaney.’ That scares me more than anything when my mom uses it.”
“Okay. Now, do we have a deal, Steve? And… please don’t let go of the controls to shake my hand.”
“Deal.”
Steve heard a seat belt being unfastened. He felt his stomach flutter as Dan Wade lifted himself from the copilot’s seat and carefully swung his leg around behind the center console, feeling his way along. He stood up and reached out to hang on to the back of one of the jump seats.
“I’ll be in the bathroom just outside the cockpit, Steve. Two minutes max.”
“What if something happens while you’re gone?”
“Then you handle it. I know you can.”
CHAPTER 16
In the rear of the coach cabin, Britta Franz leaned against the back of an unoccupied seat and looked at the gaping, jagged hole in the floor. The struggle to enlarge it had taken more effort than she’d expected, even with Dallas and Robert MacCabe taking turns with the crash ax.
She could see Dallas’s head moving among the bags below, using a flashlight to search for the one that held the handheld global positioning satellite unit. The PA announcement that they were going to cut through the floor had galvanized almost everyone aboard to wide-eyed silence while they hacked through the metal. As soon as the hole was large enough to climb through, Robert had gone back to the cockpit.
Britta glanced around the coach cabin, taking inventory of her passengers. Nine people had been moved forward to other seats to clear the aisle, most of them from the tour group, and at least a dozen were still standing at a respectful distance under the watchful eye of their tour director, Julia Mason.
Britta smiled encouragingly at Julia.
“You okay?” Julia asked in return.
Britta nodded. “Just tired,” she fibbed, trying to keep the gnawing fear she was feeling from showing up on her face. This has to be a nightmare. I’ll wake up any time now! she told herself, well aware it was real.
She thought of the passengers in first class, and the trade delegation. She’d paid little attention to them since the crisis began, but Claire, who was working the lower first-class cabin, had reported that everyone was calm. A third of the passengers in coach were Asian, men and women from Hong Kong and mainland China as well as other Asian nations. Most had remained in their seats with expressions ranging from neutral to barely masked panic, almost all of them searching Britta’s eyes for some new glimmer of hope every time she came down the aisle. The professional responsibility for maintaining a believable smile had never seemed so onerous.
The sound of bags crashing to the floor in the baggage bin below snapped Britta’s attention back to the baggage search.
“Dallas? You okay down there?” Britta called.
The answer came back with a disgusted tone. “Everything’s fine, Britta. Once I shovel two thousand pounds of suitcases off my feet, adjust my attitude, and get past the next twenty years of trying to forget this night, I’ll be just fine.”
“Okay.”
Dallas’s head popped up through the hole, carefully clear of the jagged edges. “It was light brown, right, Britta?” Dallas asked.
“That’s right.”
“And the name was Walters?”
“Yes,” she said, brightening. “Did you find it?”
Dallas shook her head. “No. But I think I know where to look now.”
Once again she disappeared, and the sound of serious bag-throwing could be heard all the way to the main deck.
In the cockpit, Dan Wade held the controls while young Steve Delaney took his turn using the bathroom. Robert MacCabe kept up a constant description of what the instruments were showing.
“You know, this is working pretty well,” Dan said, as fourteen-year-old Steve came back in the cockpit. “I’m able to visualize the attitude indicator as you describe it, and fly what I visualize.”
“Seems very steady to me,” Robert said.
“Not enough to land with, of course.”
“You certain?” Robert asked.
Dan turned slightly toward the left seat. “You ready to take over, Steve?”
Steve Delaney nodded before remembering that Dan couldn’t see the gesture. “Yeah, I’m ready.”
“You’ve got it,” Dan told him. “Keep steering a heading of two-two-zero degrees on the lower instrument there.”
“Okay.”
Dan sighed and turned partially toward Robert. “I figure we’ll cross the Vietnamese coast in twenty minutes, and daylight should overtake us in about an hour-thirty. Whatever we decide, we better have it figured out and rehearsed by then.”